RSN: 'Hat in Hand': Putin Meets Xi at Summit in Samarkand
17 September 22
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17 September 22
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The Russian president’s encounters with the Chinese leader cannot be considered a meeting of equals, analysts say.
The Russian and Chinese leaders met on Thursday as Putin’s relations with the West continued to unravel over his war on Ukraine and as China’s military harassment of Taiwan seemed set to put Xi on a collision course with Taipei’s United States and European allies – sanctions being hinted as the first point of impact.
The pair had last met in February, promising that the Russia-China relationship would be “without limits”.
On Thursday, Xi called Putin his “old friend”, but the mutually endorsing speeches of the two authoritarian heavyweights were muted.
Putin sat at some distance from Xi, on the opposite sides of two long rounded tables where they were flanked by their delegations.
The Russian leader began by blasting those who had attempted to “create a unipolar world”, and expressed appreciation to Xi for “the balanced position of our Chinese friends in connection with the Ukrainian crisis”.
“We understand your questions and concern about this,” Putin added, without explanation, before moving on to condemn Western “provocation” in the Taiwan Strait.
Xi’s surprising response focused on bringing stability and positivity to a world in disarray.
“China is willing to work with Russia to play a leading role in demonstrating the responsibility of major powers, and to instil stability and positive energy into a world in turmoil,” Xi told Putin.
Putin’s encounter with Xi in Samarkand appeared to underscore what analysts said was an increasingly unequal relationship between the two leaders.
Putin’s predicaments – a military quagmire in Ukraine, waves of sanctions on the Russian economy, and growing international isolation – meant that he now came “hat in hand” to meet with China.
And while Putin has emphasised the importance of Asia as an alternative to what he describes as an ailing Western-led political and economic order, the Russian leader’s own place in an Asia-led future is more of a vassal than a visionary leader, the analysts have said.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has forced Russia to turn to its fellow Eurasian giant, hat in hand,” Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine.
China has thrown Russia an economic lifeline since the invasion of Ukraine led to sanctions imposed on the Russian economy. But, the disruption has been to the benefit of China too, which has positioned itself as an alternative market for Russian goods, and as a major customer for cheap Russian fuel.
“China and Russia often appear as a pair, two great authoritarian powers seeking to revise the international order. But theirs is not a relationship of equals,” Gabuev said, explaining that Beijing’s dominance in its relationship with Moscow is only likely to grow as the war in Ukraine persists.
Xi and Putin both share a “nostalgic and resentful desire” to see their countries’ grandeur restored, and blame the West for stifling their rise. But Beijing also knows that too much support for Russia could expose it to sanctions.
Yet, too little support for Putin could endanger ties with the leader of a country with whom China shares a more than 4,000-kilometre-long border, and whose economic and trade needs are compatible – cheap Russian fuel and raw materials in exchange for Chinese liquidity, Gabuev said.
Faced with those options, Beijing has sat firmly on the fence when it comes to increasing support for Moscow, while Russia has become increasingly reliant on Beijing for its economic survival.
‘Where else?’
Putin has few other places to turn than to Asia, said Carlyle Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales Canberra, who characterised Putin’s so-called “pivot” to Asia as being spurred more by necessity than virtue.
“Where else is there for Russia to go?” Thayer asked.
Speaking before Putin and Xi’s meeting in Samarkand, Thayer correctly predicted a show of solidarity mixed with criticism of the West as the two leaders glossed over the war in Ukraine and focused on Western military expansionism.
“It will be a triumphalist”, Thayer told Al Jazeera.
“The reality”, however, is that Putin is subservient in the relationship with Xi and he must put “on a brave face” as he aligns with the positions of the Chinese leader.
Expect “a level of Potemkinism” in Samarkand, Thayer said.
China’s deep reliance on trade with the West means that Beijing will not want to do anything that jeopardises its economy rebuilding after the COVID-19 pandemic, said Seva Gunitsky, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
He described China’s approach to Putin as one where it continues “rhetorical” support for the Russian leader, but is “hedging its bets” on going any further with Moscow.
“It’s not a good time to risk anything to come to the aid of Russia, particularly when Russia is doing so poorly in the war,” Gunitsky told Al Jazeera.
“China has a stake in the outcome of the conflict. If Putin is seen as weak, it will be embarrassing for China,” Gunitsky added.
And while Putin is doing so badly in the conflict, Beijing is not going to “jump in the same pool of fire” with Russia.
Putin’s meeting with Xi followed on the heels of the Chinese military’s participation in extensive exercises with Russian forces. The Vostok 2022 (East 2022) drills were held in Russia’s Far East and the Sea of Japan.
After the war games, Putin then participated in the Eastern Economic Forum in Russia’s Pacific port city of Vladivostok where he lauded Asia’s increasing influence in the world.
“No matter how much someone would like to isolate Russia, it is impossible to do this,” the Russian president told the forum.
A partnership between Russia and the Asia-Pacific region offered “colossal new opportunities for our people”, and economic sanctions on the Russian economy had backfired on the West, he said.
“In an attempt to resist the course of history, West countries are undermining the key pillars of the world economic system, built over centuries,” he said.
But, Asia is rising.
“Irreversible and even tectonic changes have taken place throughout international relations. The role of dynamic, promising countries and regions of the world, primarily the Asia-Pacific region, has significantly increased,” Putin said.
One notable tectonic change in international relations since the invasion of Ukraine has been the price Russia is paid for fuel exports by its new Asian customers.
Chinese data showed this week that China is buying more of less expensive Russian energy supplies. Russia became China’s top crude oil supplier from May to July, a volume amount that accounted for 19 percent of all China’s crude imports, Reuters reported.
For liquified natural gas (LNG), China’s imports from Russia rose 26 percent in the first seven months of this year compared with the same period in 2021. China’s coal imports from Russia also jumped to their highest level in at least five years in July.
“China saved about $3bn in buying Russian oil versus other imports between April and July,” Reuters calculated, noting that China paid about $708 per tonne for Russian crude while the value of imports from other importing countries was $816 per tonne.
And while the financial gains for China are obvious, Russia remains more reliant on the trade than China, analysts said.
“It is apparent that Russia can no longer rely on its major energy export markets in Europe for the foreseeable future, and the redirection of its energy and commodity exports towards the East will gather pace,” Tilak Doshi, managing director of Doshi Consulting, told Reuters.
India, too, is reaping the benefits of cheap Russian energy, according to Reuters.
Rarely purchasing Russian oil in the past, India has now become Moscow’s second-largest oil customer after China as Indian refineries have snapped up discounted Russian oil that has been shunned by Western countries.
Tarnished the authoritarian ‘brand’
Bobo Lo, a non-resident fellow at Australian think-tank the Lowy Institute, sees the war in Ukraine as exposing the limits of the relationship between China and Russia rather than setting the stage for their expansion.
While some might see an “axis” of authoritarianism developing in the Xi-Putin relationship, Lo wrote of China as being engaged in a “balancing act” when it comes to handling Russia and the “friendship without limits”.
“They cheer-lead on behalf of each other, offering moral and political support to their partner when their interests align. But China and Russia are strategically autonomous actors, whose influence on each other’s behaviour is limited and indirect at best,” Lo said.
And rather than being propelled into a new orbit of cooperation, the long-term outlook for the Russia-China relationship is not promising, he said.
Far from the creation of an “arc of autocracy” in the Asia-Pacific, the Xi and Putin relationship is primarily based on the self-interests of two “strategically autonomous powers” and a fundamental difference is that China is “invested in global order”.
China wishes to play a more dominant role, but it does not wish to “demolish” that order. Putin, however, is focused on “disruptive power” and a “complete overthrow” of the international system.
“That is why Putin has resorted so readily to military force – in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine and, more covertly, in Iraq, Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic,” Lo says.
Russia, but not China, has invested in the value of waging war.
“He [Putin] and those around him identify Russia’s ability and will to wage war as a comparative advantage that few others, apart from the United States, possess,” Lo said.
Putin’s calculations have not gone to plan, however, and the war in Ukraine has rejuvenated the West, which is now more aligned and unified than it has been in decades.
The invasion of Ukraine has also weakened China’s hand on Taiwan, as both US Democrats and Republicans now agree on the need to defend the island, which also means confronting China, Lo said.
As Lo noted, if the US is willing to do so much to defend Ukraine, it would certainly be decisive in its defence of Taiwan.
China can see that Putin has made many missteps in Ukraine, Lo said, where his actions have revealed the Russian president “to be not only vicious, but also acutely fallible”.
Xi, he said, can not be happy with Putin’s tarnishing of the authoritarian “brand” through a failing military campaign that had undermined “authoritarianism’s reputation for efficiency”.
Putin has set a very poor example, he added.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become an anti-modal of how an authoritarian state should pursue its interests.”
Two workers stand at a mass burial site containing around 440 bodies found in liberated Izium, Kharkiv Oblast, Sept. 16, 2022. (photo: Kostyantyn Chernichkin/Kyiv Independent)
Exhumation works have started at a mass burial site with about 440 graves in liberated Izium, which had been discovered on Sept. 15.
Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said that bodies of Ukrainian soldiers with tied hands were found at the site. He added that the soldiers might have been tortured before being killed.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said that bodies of children were also found at the same site.
United Nations human rights office said on Sept. 16 that it plans to send its monitors to inspect the site. The details are still unclear, including its timeframe.
At least 10 torture chambers have been discovered in the liberated areas of Kharkiv Oblast, Head of the National Police of Ukraine Ihor Klymenko said on Sept. 16.
Two of the chambers were found in the city of Balakliia. One of them was located in a local police station. According to Klymenko, about 40 people were kept in captivity simultaneously there for up to 48 days. Another chamber in Balakliia was set up in a printing house.
People “were kept in terrible conditions, they were abused and tortured,” Klymenko said.
Six more torture chambers were found in Izium, the police chief said.
More than 1,000 police officers have been additionally sent to collect evidence of potential Russian war crimes in the liberated territories of Kharkiv Oblast. Over 200 criminal proceedings against Russian troops have already been opened, according to Klymenko.
Raging war
The Southern Operational Command reported that the front line situation in Kherson Oblast is “steadily tense, but under control.”
The report also says that Russia’s military continues to shell Ukraine’s positions along the front line, all the while reorganizing its troops and likely planning new attacks.
In Donetsk Oblast, Russian forces conducted attacks using their tanks, mortars and artillery in the direction of Sloviansk, Avdiivka, Bakhmut, and Kramatorsk, the General Staff of the Ukrainian military reported.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin reiterated on Sept. 16 that the seizure of entire Donbas, a region in eastern Ukraine that comprises Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, remains the main aim of Russia's war.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine’s operation in Kharkiv Oblast was “extremely encouraging.” However, NATO chief warned that it was not a signal that the end of the war was approaching, calling on nations to prepare for the long haul.
Blasts in Russian-occupied territories
Russian media reported explosions in occupied Luhansk in the east and Kherson in the south on Sept. 16.
In the city of Luhansk, a former regional administrative center that Russia seized in 2014, its proxy leader Leonid Pasechnik said that a bomb blast had killed Sergey Gorenko, a proxy in charge of prosecution, and his deputy Ekaterina Steglenko at their office. Leonid Pasechnik blamed Kyiv for the attack.
Shortly after the reports of the explosion came out, adviser to Zelensky’s office Mykhailo Podolyak denied Ukraine being behind the mysterious blast. He suggested that it may have been an internal mafia dispute or an attempt to get rid of witnesses of war crimes.
Also on Sept. 16, Russian state-controlled RIA Novosti news agency published a video allegedly taken in occupied Kherson capturing what it says is the aftermath of a different blast.
The report claimed, citing local proxies, that the Ukrainian strike damaged an administration building and nearby residential buildings in occupied Kherson – Ukraine’s ultimate target in its ongoing southern counteroffensive.
The Guardian said it appears to be the work of both intelligence and U.S.-provided HIMARS long-range rockets, with Kyiv likely carrying out the strike as proxies in Kherson Oblast met inside the city’s main government building and court.
Many Russian soldiers and collaborators were killed in the explosion, Serhiy Khlan, a member of the Kherson Oblast Council, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He did not comment on who was behind the attack.
Ukraine hasn’t officially commented on the attack.
Casualties
Even though the flood situation in the city of Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, has improved days after a Russian missile strike on a local dam on Sept. 14, the city was hit once again.
The recent Russian missile strike hit hydraulic facilities again, according to Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Governor Valentyn Reznichenko, who reported “serious damage” inflicted on the infrastructure.
Another attack on Dnipropetrovsk Oblast hit the village of Velyka Kostromka, killing two people and wounding one, according to governor Reznichenko. The official also reported some infrastructural damages but didn't provide details.
In embattled Donetsk Oblast, another five people were killed and six others were wounded within a day, its governor Pavlo Kyrylenko reported in the morning of Sept. 16.
Kyrylenko said that Russian forces have shelled Bakhmut and Pokrovsk districts overnight, followed by an especially intense attack on Avdiivka’s city center in the morning.
Russian S-300 air defense missiles also struck the village of Selydove at midnight, damaging 32 residential buildings, a school, a gymnasium, and a kindergarten, according to the governor.
Russian shelling also struck Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest metropolis, its mayor Ihor Terekhov reported on Sept. 16. Four people received minor injuries as a result of the attack, according to the official.
An autonomous surveillance tower made by Anduril and employed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (photo: Benjamin Rasmussen/WIRED)
An autonomous surveillance tower made by Anduril and employed by US customs and border protection in Valentine, Texas. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
One Anduril tower, perched on a hill, has a clear view over the rusty brown border wall and into the Mexican town of Tecate. From here, it can detect people who climb over the wall and walk across the rugged landscape on the US side. Approach the hill and the camera atop the tower swivels toward you.
These boulder-speckled hills of the Otay Mountain Wilderness of California have seen a sharp increase in border crossings in the last year, according to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Since March 2020, the US has expelled nearly 2 million people under Title 42, a pandemic-era rule that closes safe ports of entry to asylum seekers. Rather than wait in Mexico border towns, where they are at risk of kidnapping and sexual assault, migrants have instead attempted to reach US soil via dangerous routes – across deserts, mountains, rivers and oceans. More than 50 died in June after they were abandoned in a truck in the sweltering Texas heat.
Now, as migrants cross the border, they are being watched full-time.
Powered by solar panels, the Anduril towers operate day and night and can be set up in remote areas, including near military bases, airports and oil and gas pipelines, the company boasts on its website. The towers use an artificial intelligence system called Lattice to autonomously identify, detect and track “objects of interest”, such as humans or vehicles. The cameras pan 360 degrees and can detect a human from 2.8km away.
When the system identifies an object, it sends a notification to border agents on their phone or desktop, and an image appears with bright green rectangles around the item, according to an Anduril promotional video. CBP has described these towers as “a partner that never sleeps, never needs to take a coffee break, never even blinks”.
The Anduril tower near Tecate is just one in a chain of hundreds of surveillance towers installed over the last two decades along the southern border. Not all are made by Anduril, but the company is making aggressive moves. According to a freedom of information request shared with the Guardian by Empower, CBP has a contract with Anduril to deploy a total of 189 autonomous surveillance towers on the south-west border.
All this new surveillance is driven by investment from big tech – specifically the billionaire PayPal co-founder and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm Founders Fund is a large investor in Anduril. The firm itself was set up in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a former Facebook employee who identifies as a libertarian and has donated to a pro-Trump group. Luckey’s goal, he says in his bio on the company site, is to “radically transform the defence capabilities of the United States and its allies by fusing artificial intelligence with the latest hardware advancements”. Anduril, he told Wired, was named after a sword from The Lord of the Rings.
Initially, the company pitched its towers to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office in California, framing them as a cheap border security option. But in 2020, after a successful pilot project in the San Diego sector, the Trump administration approved a contract to deploy autonomous towers along the full length of the south-west border.
Boasting of the towers’ effectiveness, Anduril’s chief revenue officer, Matt Steckman, told the Big Bend Sentinel that data showed a spike in alerts in the weeks after they are installed, then a decrease as smugglers appear to learn their locations and avoid them. “You’ll see traffic sort of squirting to the east and west,” Steckman said. Anduril did not respond to requests for comment.
Border patrol agents are certainly big fans. In April, a tower alerted agents to 171 migrants crossing the border into Texas, where agents detained them and sent them to CBP stations for processing. Agents also regularly share photos of large groups they intercept using the towers. In April, Chief Patrol Agent Sean McGoffin tweeted a photo of about a dozen people standing in the Texas desert. “Agents working the midnight shift were able to spot the group with the assistance from surveillance tower technology,” he wrote.
The Anduril towers fit into an expanding virtual wall, one that doesn’t just trace the border but also extends 100 miles into the US interior and includes highway checkpoints, predator drones, licence plate readers, facial recognition, ground sensors, and mobile surveillance mounted on vehicles, not to mention the digital tracking of migrants in detention. CBP is even piloting robot dogs to help agents patrol the border.
This expansion of border security is largely bipartisan: Trump attracted a lot of attention for trying to expand the physical wall and approving new surveillance, including Anduril’s towers, but the legacy of the last four administrations continues under Joe Biden. During the 2020 election campaign, Biden said building a physical wall had not deterred people from crossing and that “not another foot” of border wall would be built on his watch. Instead he has promised more DHS funding for “smart security” along the border. (In July, his administration did authorize new wall construction in Arizona, to close gaps in a border wall first approved by Trump.)
Biden’s promise of more surveillance is being made good: CBP took $21m from Congress in the 2022 omnibus bill for autonomous surveillance towers, and its budget request for 2023 includes another $13.5m, which would be used to consolidate and support more than 700 surveillance towers, built by different companies, with varying degrees of functionality, along the northern and southern borders.
CBP confirmed the plan to integrate the towers to the Guardian. In its draft budget request, it said that although the surveillance towers provide “significant situational awareness”, they rely too much on humans to detect people crossing the border. The goal now is to “seamlessly” combine the various operating systems of the different towers, to “easily control the towers and exploit useful data” as part of a long-term goal to use more automation to stop “threats”. The agency did not answer a list of questions regarding border surveillance.
Sheriffs in border communities argue that new technologies, like rescue beacons and the Anduril towers, are helping to save lives. “We have rescued quite a few people in distress because of new tools,” the Culberson county sheriff, Oscar Carrillo, told the Dallas Morning News.
But in August, members of Congress representing immigrant and border communities sent a letter to the House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, in which they expressed their concern over the harm the new border surveillance money would cause migrants, border residents, Indigenous communities, journalists and protesters. “We have strong reservations about funding more invasive technologies that are wasteful and insidious,” they wrote.
Pedro Rios, director of the US-Mexico border program for the American Friends Service Committee, a US-based social justice organisation, goes further. He calls the expansion of the digital wall “deadly” because it pushes people to take longer routes to evade detection, contributing to thousands of deaths at the southern border.
Rios lives in Chula Vista, a short drive from the border wall that slices across the sandy beach and into the Pacific Ocean, dividing Imperial Beach from Tijuana. Here, too, the ubiquitous border patrol agents drive their ATVs along muddy roads, helicopters hover above, and surveillance towers watch from higher ground.
Rios indicated a recently installed surveillance tower that was aiming its infrared camera at the crashing waves. He said smugglers carry migrants on jet skis and other marine vessels. “There’s been an increase in people that are crossing through smaller panga boats,” he said.
It has become significantly harder to cross the border without detection in the last decade, according to CBP data published by the American Immigration Council, and last year Maria Eugenia Chavez Segovia from Mexico City drowned along with two other people when a smuggler boat ran aground off Point Loma. Agents had already twice intercepted her on land and returned her to Mexico.
Rios argues the bipartisan project of hardening the border is killing people. He has spotted makeshift ladders hanging from the wall, and since 2019, when the DHS increased the height of the wall in southern San Diego from 17ft to 30ft, the number of severe injuries and deaths has increased. (In another reversal of Biden’s campaign promise, his administration announced in June that it would increase the height of the wall in other sections, too.)
As well as being deadly, increased surveillance infringes on the civil liberties of people living near the border, Rios believes, because they are often not consulted before new tech is deployed. He grew up in south San Diego, and identifies as a “fronterizo”, or borderlander, and has family on both sides of the frontier, but notes that CBP did not consult nearby residents before installing the infrared tower overlooking the beach. (CBP did not respond when asked to confirm.)
As a child, he said, he watched the borderlands from a swing in his back yard. Some of his classmates went on to become border patrol agents. Over the years, he says, he has witnessed a hardening of the border.
“All of this area, where I grew up and call home, has undergone a process of militarization that continues to expand,” he said. “The use of surveillance technologies is an extension of that militarization.”
This militarization began in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, whose policy of “prevention through deterrence” aimed to make some areas of the border more like a fortress, in order to drive migration into harsher regions like the Arizona desert.
Then, in 2005, George Bush established a multibillion-dollar program called the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBINet). It was an attempt to deploy a virtual fence along the border – including ground sensors to detect footsteps and vehicles, and radar and cameras mounted on towers – to gather data about “objects of interest” and send it to command centres, so border agents could better respond to migrant crossings. After a 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office found SBINet was over budget and didn’t deliver on its goals, Barack Obama cancelled it the following year – though the infrastructure remained.
Instead, first Obama and then Trump funded a different program that they hoped would be an improvement: Integrated Fixed Towers, which consist of multiple cameras, radar, spotlights, laser illuminators and communications equipment mounted 180ft above the ground “to provide long-range, persistent surveillance” according to a CBP report. Built by defence tech company Elbit, the towers send data to a system called Torch, which it developed for the Israeli military. CBP has also deployed Mobile Video Surveillance Systems (MVSS), extendable towers with long-range infrared cameras that sit in the beds of trucks and are operated by border patrol agents.
All along, officials have claimed the new technology would deter migration and help migrant safety, yet nearly 10,000 migrants have died crossing the border in the last 25 years, and the deaths are increasing, according to CBP numbers obtained by the Washington Examiner. Sam Chambers, a geographer at the University of Arizona who studied SBINet, has found that people take longer, more strenuous paths to avoid surveillance towers. Between 2002 and 2016, he found the death rate increased by a factor of five.
But the new tech is big business. The border security market, globally, is now worth $45bn, according to a recent report by the market research company IMARC Group, as countries, not least the US, invest more in unmanned border security in response to global conflict, climate breakdown and displacement.
In the US, tech companies lobby heavily for these government contracts. Anduril, for example, has spent $520,000 so far this year and $930,000 last year on lobbying the US Senate, the House of Representatives and the DHS on budget decisions.
“Migrants don’t have paid lobbyists in DC, but these military tech corporations do,” said Julie Mao, co-founder and deputy director of Just Futures Law, an immigration law project. “That is why the ‘smart wall’ messaging and border surveillance money is growing at such a high rate.”
The potential contracts are huge. According to analysis by Just Futures Law shared with the Guardian, CBP’s budget for 2023 includes about $1bn in border surveillance money, including for helicopters, border patrol vehicles and a mobile map-based application called a Team Awareness Kit (TAK) that helps agents see data gathered from towers and other sources in real time. Just Futures Law found that about 5,000 TAK units have been deployed to border patrol agents, primarily along the south-west border, and CBP plans to hand out nearly 20,000 kits total. Mao called it “deeply disappointing” that the Biden administration is investing in the “smart border wall”.
Anduril, meanwhile, is moving to expand: it is attempting to raise $1.2bn to increase its valuation, TechCrunch reported.
To Rios, the framing of migration by media and politicians in war-like terms – such as “surge” or “invasion” – drives more investment in border security.
“Once these private companies are able to respond to it with their fancy enforcement toys, that they can then market and sell to the government, that’s when we have the deployment of the towers and sensors and other gadgets,” he said.
“As a way to cleanse their politics around border issues, the Democrats have pushed for the idea of a virtual or surveillance border wall, or smart technologies – that really aren’t that smart at all, because we see the impact to human life continues to be human suffering, injuries and death.”
Activists protest outside the senate chambers in the Indiana Statehouse in Indianapolis, Indiana. (photo: Cheney Orr/Reuters)
In his Friday coronavirus briefing, Justice called the signed bill the “protect life” law. He said he wanted the legislature to bring him a bill that contained “reasonable and logical” exceptions.
The law outlaws abortions in West Virginia except in cases when the mother’s life is in danger, or instances of rape and incest that are reported to law enforcement in a timely manner. Any abortion performed must be done so in a hospital within eight weeks for adults and 14 weeks for minors.
“I believe wholeheartedly that it does one thing that is absolutely so important,’ Justice said. “It does protect life.”
When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, it turned abortion legislation back to the states.
West Virginia had a law on the books banning abortion since before it became a state. The original code was enacted in 1849. The state’s lone abortion clinic, the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, joined a group of reproductive rights activists in quickly filing suit to have that 19th century law enjoined. They said subsequent laws passed addressing abortion exeptions made the old law moot.
Shortly after the federal ruling, state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey issued an opinion on the status of that law.
Morrisey’s opinion stated:
Enacted in 1849 and never repealed since, West Virginia Code § 61-2-8 provides that “[a]ny person who shall administer to, or cause to be taken by, a woman, any drug or other thing, or use any means, with intent to destroy her unborn child, or to produce abortion or miscarriage, and shall thereby destroy such child, or produce such abortion or miscarriage,” commits a felony punishable by three to ten years in prison.
The statute covers persons who perform abortions and, at least arguably, women who seek them. The West Virginia statute may “spring back to life” and “regain [its] vitality.”
Challengers have already filed a suit to enjoin this law in Kanawha County Circuit Court.
They argue that the statute has been impliedly repealed, that the doctrine of desuetude applies given the lack of recent enforcement, and that the provisions are unconstitutionally vague. Assuredly, we have strong arguments against this challenge. But the statute would still benefit from the Legislature’s further attention.
On July 18, 2022, a Kanawha County judge granted an injunction denying enforcement of the 19th century law banning abortions. Following the ruling, the Woman’s Health Center of West Virginia announced publicly it would return to providing reproductive health care that includes abortions.
Morrisey appealed the court decision; that case is still pending. Morrisey said the statute would benefit from the legislature’s attention. Justice called the legislature into special session in late July to take up abortion legislation clarification. A bill was introduced and heated debate ensued on the House and Senate floors. The noise from public protests outside the chambers spilled into the Senate gallery. Capitol Police threatened arrests and the loud and angry gallery was cleared by Senate President Craig Blair. The legislature could come to no consensus and adjourned
On September 13, the West Virginia Legislature reconvened in that special session and passed House Bill 302, outlawing abortion in West Virginia, with limited exceptions.
The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 22 to 7 with 5 members absent. The bill then moved to the House of Delegates, which passed it by a vote of 77 to 17 with six members absent. In instances of legal abortion, the procedure is limited to M.D.s and Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine. Doctors who perform an abortion as part of a medical emergency would not be penalized.
There will be no felony penalties for doctors or pregnant women, but the law would make it a felony for anyone who performs an abortion who is not a licensed professional.
Justice said the bulk of the new abortion law is effective from passage. He said any criminal penalties contained in the law will take effect 90 days from Sept. 16, 2022.
West Virginia is the 2nd state, after Indiana, to pass a ban on abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in June.
A prisoner. (photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
The filing urges UN special rapporteurs to declare life sentences, including without parole, a violation of incarcerated people’s rights
Carter had spent 30 years of his life in prison without parole for second-degree murder he committed in Pennsylvania, one of six states in the US where there is no possibility of parole when sentenced to life. In July, after Governor Tom Wolf commuted his sentence, Carter, now 53, regained his freedom after a nearly three-year process petitioning with the state board of pardons. Still, he said he felt “survivor’s guilt”.
“It shows me the other guys who were just as deserving as I was couldn’t make it not because they are not worthy but because the process is super arbitrary,” Carter told the Guardian from a halfway house just a month after his release. “The system doesn’t allow room for a person to seek redemption.”
A coalition of civil and human rights organizations on Thursday filed a complaint urging United Nations special rapporteurs to declare the United States’ longstanding practice of subjecting people to life sentences, including without possible release, “cruel, racially discriminatory” and “an arbitrary deprivation of liberty” that violates incarcerated people’s rights.
They argued that “death by incarceration” – a term describing life sentences without parole coined by Carter and other members of the Right to Redemption Committee, a group of incarcerated people seeking the abolition of the practice – amounted to torture. In their complaint, the civil rights organizations asked the international watchdogs to pressure the United States, who leads the world in sentencing people to life imprisonment, to abolish the extreme practice altogether. They proposed instead to impose maximum sentencing laws that would eliminate the practice of “virtual life” sentences – those longer than a person’s remaining years of life expectancy, often more than 50 years.
“Death by incarceration is the devastating consequence of a cruel and racially discriminatory criminal legal system that is designed not to address harm, violence, and its root causes, but to satisfy the political pressure to be tough on crime,” the complaint noted.
Dozens of testimonies from incarcerated people sentenced to life detail the horrific toll so-called “death by incarceration” has not just on their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing but also the lasting impact separation has on their family members. Carlos Ruiz Paz, who is serving a life sentence in California, wrote in a testimonial that a life sentence without parole signaled a person was “irreparably damaged without hope of redemption”, adding: “Extreme sentences affect the kids who grow up without us and the parents that will die without us at their side.”
The complaint noted that the United States’ use of virtual life sentences increased exponentially since the 1970s, particularly after the supreme court abolished the death penalty in 1972, prompting states to strengthen life sentencing laws for offenders. Even after the supreme court reversed course in 1976, extreme sentencing practices continued. By the 1980s and 90s, as the federal government incentivized states to impose harsher sentencing practices in an effort to curtail perceived rises in crime, more and more people were imprisoned for longer.
The toll of that suffering has disproportionately upended the lives of Black and brown people who have been subjected to over-policing throughout time, exposing them to the US carceral system and led to escalating mass incarceration. Organizers argue that that violates international human rights law prohibiting racial discrimination. “This systemic deprivation of resources, including education, healthcare and other social support and services, is coupled with the entry of more police and prisons in these communities and exposure to the criminal legal system,” the complaint noted.
The US is the only country that sentences children under 18 to life without parole, a practice that the United Nations has already singled out. And the US accounted for more than 80% of people worldwide serving life sentences without parole.
“We are the world leader in life imprisonment,” said Kara Gotsch, deputy director of the Sentencing Project, one of the organizations involved in the UN complaint. “We’re just continuing to warehouse people, expose them to dangerous conditions in prisons that are not built for old people, quite frankly. And it’s not serving the public interest or our moral interest is to incarcerate elderly people, until they die, because they’re not a threat to public safety.”
Black people accounted for 12% of the US population in 2020 yet made up 46% of all incarcerated people serving life or virtual life sentences, according to the Sentencing Project. What’s more, people of color account for more than two-thirds of those incarcerated serving life sentences in the US. For Latino Americans, the disparity is smaller but still stark, particularly at the state level: in California, where a third of its prison population serves a life sentence, nearly 40% of those serving life sentences are Latino and a third are Black. Though women account for just 3% of the US prison population serving life sentences, the number of women serving such sentences grew 32% faster than men in the past decade.
When Rose Marie Dinkins reflects on the past five decades in SCI Muncy in Pennsylvania, she sees how the US criminal justice system doesn’t allow mercy for change. Dinkins, a Black mother of four, was 24 when, in 1972, she was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences after she killed two police officers during an armed robbery. Her children, then toddlers, were now adults with children and grandchildren. Dinkins recounted how she had great-grandchildren she had never seen.
Dinkins saw how “the American justice system values some lives more than others”, pointing to how Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, will be eligible for parole.
“These discriminatory sentencing practices have gone on for far too long,” she added. “No one deserves to die in prison who has made the effort to change for the better.”
Bret Grote, legal director of the Abolitionist Law Center, one of the organizations submitting the complaint, told the Guardian that pressure from the United Nations and the international community could bolster the ongoing movement.
He and others pointed to the impact past condemnations by the UN of solitary confinement practices and imprisonment of youth on life sentences have had on influencing legislative change. The complaint to the UN arises ahead of a case in Pennsylvania challenging the state’s life sentences without parole statute for people convicted of a felony that led to someone’s death, even if the person who received the sentence had no direct connection to the death.
By the time Carter first entered prison at 23, he had struggled with drugs and saw himself growing up in a society “that taught me that my Blackness was a curse”. “It destroyed my self-esteem,” he told the Guardian. Over time, after years of self-reflection work, he believed he could get a second chance, even as he was relegated to what he saw as a death sentence. He turned to writing, publishing three novels and co-authoring a Northwestern Law Review article with Rachel Lopez entitled Redeeming Justice that makes the case for rehabilitation and redemption from imprisonment.
He eventually helped form the Right to Redemption Committee, which was established in 2011 and advocates for abolishing life without parole in Pennsylvania and beyond, and they wanted to file a petition to the United Nations calling for “death by incarceration” to be classified as a human rights violation. Now that he’s out of prison, he hopes to facilitate writing workshops and create “redemption hubs” for formerly incarcerated people to contribute back to society after release.
His release by commutation is a rarity in the US, especially for Black people seeking pardon: a 2011 study of pardons under former presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama found that white applicants had a 12% chance of acceptance while Black applicants had between 2 and 4% chance. And in Pennsylvania alone, Governor Tom Wolf commuted 53 life sentences over seven years, a far cry from the just six between 1995 and 2015.
“The idea of redemption should be something that the state facilitates as opposed to hindering. They hinder the idea of atonement by imprisoning people but also confining people in the worst expression of themselves for the rest of their lives, even though that’s not who they are,” Carter told the Guardian. “That’s a gross violation of human rights.”
Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's president, delivers a state of the union address. (photo: Camilo Freedman/Bloomberg)
Experts say President Nayib Bukele’s move would violate at least four articles of El Salvador’s constitution.
“I’m announcing to the Salvadoran people that I’ve decided to run as a candidate for president of the republic,” Bukele said late on Thursday in an Independence Day speech livestreamed on public television and social media. Bukele’s current term is set to end in 2024.
“Developed countries have re-election,” he said. “And thanks to the new configuration of the democratic institution of our country, now El Salvador will too.”
The announcement came one year after new justices on the country’s Supreme Court – appointed by lawmakers aligned with Bukele – ruled that presidents can seek a second consecutive term despite the constitutional ban.
Constitutional lawyers have said allowing presidents to seek re-election would violate at least four articles of the constitution, including one that limits presidential terms to five years and states that the person who serves as president will not continue in their functions for one day more.
The top court’s ruling in September of last year drew widespread condemnation and spurred fears of a return to authoritarianism in El Salvador.
The US State Department also slammed the decision as one that “undermines democracy”, warning that a “decline in democratic governance damages” the United States’s relationship with the Central American country.
Bukele has enjoyed high approval ratings since he took office in 2019. According to a poll carried out last month by CID Gallup, 85 percent of people approve of his presidency while 95 percent are happy with his government’s handling of security matters.
But the president has faced growing criticism from human rights groups and foreign governments about his concentration of power.
“This constitutional breakdown was predictable,” Juan Papier, Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), wrote in a tweet on Thursday.
“El Salvador has long been on the way to becoming a dictatorship and many, due to ideological bias, cowardice, geopolitical interests or obsession with immigration, did not want to raise their voices in time or help prevent it,” he said.
Bukele, who has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, in recent months has led a crackdown against gangs, using emergency powers that congress on Wednesday extended for a sixth time.
Rights groups say many innocent people have been arrested without cause, and they have documented a range of abuses, including deaths in custody, and civil rights violations under the state of emergency.
In August, El Salvador’s chief of police announced that more than 50,000 people had been detained during the crackdown.
“Some in the international community … they criticise the capture of gang members, as if they wanted us to be doing badly again,” Bukele said on Thursday. “This is the only way for El Salvador. We already proved it; this is not a campaign promise.”
In a report in June, HRW said “gross human rights violations, including arbitrary detention seemingly based on individuals’ appearance and social background, as well as short-term enforced disappearances” had been committed.
The report also found that Bukele’s government had significantly weakened democratic institutions in El Salvador, allowing his administration to operate with little checks on his executive power.
Firefighters tackle a wildfire in Oroville, California. Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, research suggests. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
“California Burning” author Katherine Blunt on the lessons learned in California.
These events echo some of what happened in the summer of 2018. California was facing its hottest summer then on record when PG&E power lines sparked the Camp Fire. The fire found plenty of fuel in the hot, dry season to level the town of Paradise and led to at least 85 deaths. PG&E ultimately pled guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter and one felony.
Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Blunt and her colleagues were finalists for a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting throughout the crisis. Her new book, California Burning, is an even more thorough chronicle of the many failures of PG&E to invest in an outdated grid for its 16 million customers.
I spoke to her about the lessons her reporting contains, not just for PG&E and California, but for utilities and customers everywhere in the changed climate. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Wildfire season has become longer and more destructive because of the warming climate. Downed power lines are going to keep sparking fires, and those fires are worse because it’s so dry. Still, it’s not always clear where the line is between manmade disaster and natural disaster. How do you draw that line?
Over the last 10 years the risk profile of PG&E’s service territory changed very quickly, as a result of severe drought that killed millions of trees. So the consequence of a spark from a power line all of a sudden has much more devastating potential than it had historically. The fire faces greater risk of spreading quickly out of control, as we’ve seen with the fires that have destroyed large parts of Northern California.
Power lines inherently have the potential to cause fires. If it’s a small blaze, it’s easy to contain in a day or two. Or, does it spread to become something like the Camp Fire on the other end of the extreme? The climate factor and environmental changes have really added to the severity of the challenges that the company faces in trying to mitigate fire risk and address the threats that its power lines may pose.
It’s like being trapped in this endless cycle. PG&E has a plan to bury a lot of power lines in the next decade. Will that really help?
The company historically has argued that burying power lines would be too expensive. They have changed their tune within the last year after the Dixie Fire of July 2021, which ignited when a tree touched a power line in the Feather River Canyon — the second largest fire in California history. After that, they came out with a new strategy to bury 10,000 miles of distribution wire, and it has the potential to really help mitigate risk. If the wire’s underground, it can’t start a fire, but it is still substantially expensive because the company estimates the cost to be $20 billion.
There are also critics who have questioned whether the undergrounding needs to be done at that scale, because there’s other things PG&E could do to insulate wires from sparking if they come into contact with trees. It’ll be up to state regulators to scrutinize whether this is the most appropriate plan. In theory, it could really do a lot to reduce risk if they are able to pull it off and do so without burdening consumers too much.
If we do find out a PG&E line is also responsible for the Mosquito Fire, is there anything different about how PG&E handled its response now compared to what it would have done before the Camp Fire?
If there’s any good takeaways from this story, it is that PG&E has never been more aware of the risk, and it’s never worked harder to try to address it. They’re doing much more by way of inspection and maintenance than they had prior to some of the devastating fires. There’s no question about that.
But the flip side of that is a level of risk inherent throughout the system. There’s always the potential for a tree branch or heavy winds to come into contact with a wire. There’s the risk for some sort of mechanical failure of a tower or pole that ultimately drops the live wire. One thing the company has been doing lately is that if an object or a tree branch comes into contact with a line that’s in an area of high risk of fire, it shuts off immediately. They have seen a reduction in ignitions, but the consequence of that is customers in some areas are experiencing much more frequent power outages.
The Mosquito Fire’s final cause is yet to be determined. But if there’s indications PG&E may have started it, it only serves to underscore the fact that some risk is inherent.
Even if a utility like PG&E gets better at warding off wildfires, they are still preemptively cutting consumers off from power. Is that why there’s been so much worry over rolling blackouts?
It’s a different issue. In California, all the utilities have, in recent years, begun to use what’s known as the public safety power shut-off. And that is a preemptive shut-off when wildfire risk seems especially high. They have been deploying this strategy quite often when the winds pick up and make it increase the likelihood of either a power line failure, or a tree branch coming into contact with a live wire. The company is also trying to do more [like trimming trees and wire maintenance] so that it won’t have to do that as often. But it’s going to be a number of years before the company doesn’t have to lean on that tool as often.
How is that different from the widespread blackouts California narrowly avoided last week?
If you hear “rolling blackouts” that’s meant specifically to keep levels of electricity supply and demand in balance. It’s a different issue. The grid is calibrated in a way that if demand threatens to exceed supply, you have the potential for widespread system failure, and it’s a really complicated and lengthy process to fix it. So that’s when you see the grid operator, in this case, the California Independent System Operator, monitoring levels of supply and demand when it’s really hot and everyone’s using electricity, and making sure that demand doesn’t exceed supply.
Supply has been tight lately for a number of reasons. Hydroelectric power has been constrained as a result of the drought. When we see these more intense Western heat waves, California has less potential to import power on an emergency basis because other states are also using a lot of electricity. And we’re seeing supply chain issues slow or delay the development of certain clean energy projects; each of the utilities are trying hard to bring on new generation and clean generation, specifically wind, solar, and battery projects.
Medium and long term, California and other regions can work through some of these challenges, but it’s also widely expected that these next few summers are going to be difficult because of those supply constraints.
Utilities are about to get billions of dollars in funding through the new Inflation Reduction Act, so I wonder where you think this story is headed.
One big focus of the Inflation Reduction Act is it attempts to speed the development of clean energy projects, which has been slowed for a number of reasons over the last year or so. That has the potential to ease some of the supply constraints we’re seeing in California and other places. Other results of the bill may be funding for basic investment in existing assets, making them more resilient, maybe improving their capacity, maybe improving their safety.
All of this is to say that spending on the health of the grid across the country is becoming increasingly important, as we see more climate risks and as we move into a future in which we will be more reliant on electricity. So I am watching how utilities across the country manage the spending on both clean energy and preparing the grid for the future of demand.
What reporting surprised you most?
I was surprised at some of the parallels between the circumstances that led to a large pipeline explosion in 2010 south of San Francisco, when a PG&E gas transmission pipeline exploded in the middle of a neighborhood, and the 2018 Camp Fire when a transmission line failed. There were stronger parallels there than I thought. And I think understanding those parallels helps understand the roots of the problems this company has faced over time.
One issue that is important to understand: Utilities make money on large capital investments that boost the overall value of their systems. They do not make money on day-to-day operations and maintenance expenses like inspections and tiny replacements here and there. And, in each case, the divisions overseeing gas transmission and electric transmission were under pressure to cut expenses, and ultimately cut expenses to the point where they weren’t doing enough to evaluate the risks throughout the system.
PG&E is the nation’s largest investor-owned utility and your book chronicles over and over again how executives overlooked maintenance. So for investor-owned utilities, is there something maybe inherently in the model that’s too focused on returning profit and cost-cutting?
Absolutely. A publicly owned utility does not have a profit motive, whereas an investor-owned utility does have a profit motive. And the argument there is that profit motive allows the company greater capital, but there can be inherent tension between private interests in delivering for shareholders and the public good. By way of maintaining the safety of the system, theoretically, a company can strike this balance. But over the last 20 years or so, PG&E did not strike this balance very well. And it’s far from the only utility that has been challenged in that way. I think it’s important to acknowledge and understand that dynamic as we evaluate the risks facing other utilities across the country.
One thing that’s kind of frightening is that with PG&E and other utilities across the country, it has often taken disaster to reveal the extent of the problem and results in some sort of system overhaul that better prioritizes safety.
I wonder how these kinds of lessons might be relevant outside California.
Think about Hurricane Ida, which flew through Louisiana last fall and knocked out all the transmission lines serving New Orleans. Stronger storms have resulted in longer and more significant power outages because of grid failure. And there have been places like Minnesota dealing with a substantial fire risk last summer. In the case of Texas’s deep freeze, one of the problems was that these plant owners didn’t invest in their plants to run at sub-freezing temperatures, because Texas historically has rarely experienced freezing temperatures.
The power grid is aging across the country. A lot of the components date back to World War II, if not prior to that. Coupled with the fact that we are seeing more extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change, utilities across the country are having to grapple with a new set of risks. How do you bolster the system to account for what, in some ways, is kind of the unknown? The past is not the same predictor of the future that it used to be. A lot of utilities across the country rely on backward-looking data and modeling to try to understand what’s going to be coming down the pike. And that’s not as useful as it once was.
I think PG&E is a cautionary tale of what happens when a utility is asked to confront new risks, and it has a general history of mismanaging risk and mismanaging spending. It only becomes more challenging, and the failure only becomes more consequential.
PG&E recommended your book as required reading for employees. That’s pretty surprising since this is holding them to account. What do you think they’d learn from reading it?
One thing that was evident to me, reporting this book, is understanding it’s a story of systemic failure.
Some of these disasters were the result of incremental decision-making over the course of years. It becomes nearly impossible to pinpoint one decision or one individual who made decisions leading to the disasters that we’ve seen over the last couple of decades. It is an enormous company in which employees are often focused on a singular task; focused on keeping trees away from power lines or on doing inspections of a certain type of equipment.
I can only hope that that knowledge helps those who might not have had the opportunity to get a bigger-picture understanding. Maybe they’ll have a better idea of how their individual decisions fit within this broader system and how their decisions can really help keep the system functioning or contribute to failure depending on the circumstances.
There’s this theme of failure in foresight.
It’s not easy. How do you prepare? How do you evaluate future risk? Historically, past risk has been used to evaluate potential future risk. And if that relationship is breaking down, how you address it is not an easy proposition.
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