Films For Action

09/06/2026

Comic by Mud Company

09/05/2026

In this episode, Katty Kay speaks with journalist Joss Fong about what scientific studies have actually been done into these fears over dwindling attention spans — and what they found.

10 minutes | In this episode, Katty Kay speaks with journalist Joss Fong about what scientific studies have actually been done into these fears over dwindling attention spans — and what they found. You’re watching New Normal with Katty Kay, each week we bring you conversations with expert guests...

09/05/2026

The US military has been exempt from reporting its greenhouse gas emissions since the Kyoto conference in 1997, a fact that rarely enters conversations about climate change even though the Pentagon is arguably the single largest institutional polluter on the planet.

Abby Martin lays out how that exemption operates in practice: hundreds of global bases, a vast arsenal, and a footprint that dwarfs any "greenwashing" gesture like testing hybrid vehicles.

Martin also details a phenomenon she calls the "million-dollar minute," where military units intentionally burn through ammunition and equipment on-site near the end of a fiscal year, not out of necessity but to justify requesting a bigger budget the following year. It's a glimpse into how the war machine runs on the same profit logic as any corporation, just with vastly higher stakes.

The environmental cost isn't abstract. Martin connects it directly to the destruction in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, where pulverized concrete becomes toxic dust and past wars leave contamination that lingers for generations. Ecological devastation is baked into how the whole imperial system operates.

Martin closes with a call for solidarity, arguing that recognizing our shared humanity across borders is what actually challenges a military-industrial complex built to keep people looking away.

16 minutes | The US military has been exempt from reporting its greenhouse gas emissions since the Kyoto conference in 1997, a fact that rarely enters conversations about climate change even though the Pentagon is arguably the single largest institutional polluter on the planet. Abby Martin lays out...

09/04/2026

It was almost predictable. After sticking to "democratic socialist" for a bit longer than the editorial board and senior editorial staff could apparently tolerate, New York Times reporters are now free to use the term "Far Left" to describe the cluster of winning candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani.

As I say, this was a predictable shift. And problematic in multiple ways.

Unapologetic U.S. right-wing media assassins, even London's Independent broadsheet, had already smeared Mamdani with the "Far Left" label way back when his campaign first gained traction. His incredible and impressive win created a grace period in the Times and elsewhere. An acceptable tag in the Times was "sewer socialist," which is actually a high compliment for people who get the reference (I speak as a Wisconsin-born admirer of Milwaukee socialist mayors Emil Seidel, Daniel Hoan, and—in my lifetime—the great Frank Zeidler).

But now it's "Far Left" for Mamdani et al, which comes pretty close to Trump's " communist." And let us note that the Times has been there many times before: sidling up to the very worst haters seems to have been in the newspaper's DNA since its founding in the middle of the 19th century.

But that's not even the real problem. Beneath the smear, and not far beneath, is a deep loathing of the slogan "Free Palestine" within a liberal establishment of which the Times is a major pillar. Peel back still further and you will find a deep fear that Mamdani and other DSA types might actually change things up in U.S. politics. Might actually tax the rich. Might bring back labor rights. Might even—quelle horreur—change the basic orientation of fatally wealth-friendly Democratic Party.

Media moguls and lazy reporters can get away with this s**t because they have no actual knowledge of what "Left" means in the U.S. context, and they in turn can count on readers who likewise know nothing. These slugs are the successors of other slugs who couldn't tell the difference between a Jane Addams and an Emma Goldman. Who couldn't tell the difference between a Gene Debs and a Big Bill Haywood. And yes, who once even tagged gentle Victor Berger as a dangerous "Far Left" enemy of the state.

In my religious world we make a useful distinction between liberals and liberationists.

The liberals were and are institutionalists: people who occupy high pulpits and high academic perches and who write in prestige journals. Their ranks included people who aligned themselves with 20th century progressive reforms and largely failed to stem the revivalist/racist tide that surged in a major way during the early Cold War years and that continues to make bad trouble today. (As the 20th century ground on, liberals were writing books and filling libraries while revivalists were building radio stations: guess who won?)

The liberationists were and are a much smaller group of Christian folks who build solidarity with empire's victims here and around the globe, who take risks to stop the war machine, and who seek to overthrow the entire underlying culture of violence. In secular terms and in the eyes of lazy journalists, liberationists would constitute an actual "Far Left." But that is exactly the kind of labeling they (I should say "we" here, because I am one of them) consistently and adamantly reject on account of idiocy and destructiveness of the entire Right/Left binary scheme.

Yes, the Rabid Right likes to pigeonhole leftists, and the ignorant media like to follow along, but so does the so-called Left itself. That's partly why the Left is so easy to ridicule.

All my life I've been in circles where people spend time and energy asking who is "sufficiently" Left and debating who is taking the "correct" ideological line. Activist groups commit su***de all the time when a hardcore "smash the state" faction gains control. Sometimes it's ideology, sometimes it's naivete, and often it's a combination of both.

Been there, done that, and done with all that.

I'll tell you what's truly radical.

What's truly radical is what the liberationists (religious and otherwise) seek to do: build a whole new culture, build Beloved Community at the ground level. This is far from a monastic path: local and national solidarity networks that are built on trust and reverence can and do sustain serious movement work everywhere they appear. Liberation, not stale leftism, is the future.

My advice to Mr. Mamdani and my DSA friends: keep your heads down, do the work, avoid factionalism, make friends, have a good time.

Forget about old models and old labels. That old Democratic donkey is dying. Use it to get some good kicks in when and where that make sense, but don't ever feel a need to yield to the forces of "moderation." Those are the forces that joined hands with Republicans to give us a "tough on crime" carceral state, a bloated military, deindustrialization, and catastrophic cuts to public welfare programs.

Tell James Carville—and The New York Times—they can go fly a kite.

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Rev. Peter Laarman is a retired minister who formerly led Progressive Christians Uniting in Los Angeles. A member of the National Council of Elders, Peter serves on NCOE's King and Breaking Silence team.

Originally published by LAProgressive[dot]com

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09/04/2026

Artificial Intelligence, and data centers in particular, are generating an unprecedented resistance – in Texas they call it the Texas Data Center Rebellion. Robinson Meyer of the climate news website Heatmap recently told the New York Times,

“Every quarter, we poll about 4,000 Americans and we ask: Would you support or oppose a data center being built near where you live? We asked that question in August of last year, and Americans were very split. They were about 43 percent in support and 42 percent against. We asked again in the spring, and this time, 21 percent of Americans said they would support a data center being built near where they live, and 71 percent said they would oppose it. So it is a staggering shift, basically, in how Americans feel about this industry and about this form of land use in their communities.”

In the latest poll from Heatmap three-quarters of Americans now say that they would oppose a new data center being built near where they live. Just 4% say they would “strongly support” a data center proposed in their area.

A June poll from Data for Progress finds that a majority of voters (63%), including 67% of Democrats, 66% of Independents, and 58% of Republicans, support pausing the construction of all US AI data centers nationwide for at least one year. Most voters think AI will increase unemployment in the U.S. and support regulations to give workers decision-making authority over how AI is used in the workplace.

Data centers are meeting unprecedented local resistance. According to a recent report, data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects around the country worth about $130 billion just from January through March 2026. Active opposition groups have grown from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of March 2026.

According to Brad Johnson of Hill Heat, “a strong pattern has emerged of hyperscale data centers causing popular revolt at the ballot box.

“After the city council of Festus, Mo. voted in favor of a $6 billion hyperscale proposal, voters promptly kicked out all four incumbents on the ballot in an April election. On the same day in April, voters in the Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington WI. showed their irritation with a massive $15 billion hyperscale facility by overwhelmingly approving a ballot measure to restrict future hyperscale projects from receiving tax-increment financing.

“In May, supervisors in Meridian, Mich. voted to put a six-month pause on data center proposals. Meanwhile, in the Grand Rapids suburb of Lowell Township, township board members refused to adopt a data center moratorium, with the majority of the council opting to court a $1 billion proposal from Microsoft instead. Now, recall petitions are circulating against the board members who voted against a moratorium, with the chair of the effort accusing Lowell board members of ‘representing Microsoft more than the people who elected them.’”

Some, even on the left, have portrayed the Data Center Resistance as affluent NIMBY-ism. Data scientist Geoff Holtzman analyzed a dataset of current and proposed data center projects alongside US census data and came to these startling conclusions:

1. The poorest neighborhoods resisted data centers at nearly five times the rate of the wealthiest (19.0% vs. 3.8%).

“The highest rate of resistance comes from neighborhoods with a median income of between $8 thousand and $72 thousand. The lowest rate of resistance is in neighborhoods where the average household makes between $133 thousand and $250 thousand per year.”

2. Recently proposed data centers that faced pushback were canceled or suspended at more than five times the rate of data centers that didn’t (28.2% vs. 5.2%).

3. Cancellation rates are highest in lower-income areas, a fact fully explained by their higher rates of pushback.

“The odds of cancellation are six times higher in neighborhoods that fight than in neighborhoods that don’t. Increased cancellation in low-income areas is fully explained by high rates of pushback in these neighborhoods, so continued proposals in these areas may stoke outrage, drive resistance, and increase cancellation rates.”

The Moratorium Cometh
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According to a new review of public records conducted by Heatmap Pro, more than 500 counties or municipalities now actively restrict or block new data centers.

These constraints, such as steep setback requirements, impossible noise limits, or outright bans on permit approvals, all but forbid the construction of data centers. The overwhelming majority of these restrictions have been enacted since the beginning of 2026. Nearly 190 have been passed since June 1.

Earlier this year the New York state legislature passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers. The law would block data center permits for “hyperscale” facilities, which it defines as those with a peak load of more than 20 megawatts. Soon thereafter, New York governor Kathy Hochul imposed the nation’s first-ever statewide freeze on new “hyperscale” data centers that can use 50 megawatts or more of power. A recent report found that bipartisan proposals for moratoriums on constructing data centers were introduced in 14 states from January through March.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a national data center moratorium that would temporarily ban the construction of data centers in the U.S. to “buy time to create strong, federal guardrails for AI.” Sen. Ed Markey and others have made other proposals for reigning in data centers. More surprisingly, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, recently called for a nationwide halt to data center construction.

Efforts to constrain data center impacts have taken a variety of forms besides moratoriums.

Michigan, Oregon, and Minnesota passed laws in the last 18 months designed to protect their pre-existing requirements that electric utilities use only emissions-free energy sources by 2040. Minnesota and Oregon ordered regulators to ensure that the energy that supplies data centers is in line with their emissions-reduction goals, while Michigan required hyperscale data centers to use 90% clean energy within six years to receive its lucrative sales tax exemption. Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona paused subsidies and tax incentives for data center developers.

The Data Center Rebellion and the Greentech New Deal
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However ludicrous the more extreme claims made for AI’s impact, that impact is too great to ignore. The continued growth of AI and data centers at current rates threatens to derail the Greentech revolution. Unrestrained they will lead to aggravated climate change, local ecological devastation, unaffordable electricity, and a substantial growth and centralization of oligarchical power. It’s hard to see who they will benefit except a handful of the world’s richest men.

Just as there is little precedent for the explosive proliferation of hyperscale data centers, so there is little precedent for the data center rebellion. David Wallace-Wells and Robinson Meyer discussed in the New York Times whether the gathering coalition of Americans against data centers “could be the next Occupy Wall Street movement or Tea Party.”

Perhaps the closest we have to a historical precedent is the anti-toxics movement that followed the exposure of toxic chemical dumps under low-income neighborhoods at Love Canal and the nationwide explosion of protest that followed as hundreds of communities around the country discovered that they too were exposed to toxic dumps. They created a nationwide movement against toxic dumps and won the landmark Superfund law which established unprecedented accountability for corporate polluters.

The local anti-data center movements are about as close as you can come to true grassroots rebellion. While many organizations are providing support, they are not the result of an organizing campaign or national call.

Close examination shows that they are being created by people talking with their neighbors, banding together in their neighborhoods, packing meetings, confronting politicians, and throwing out officials who don’t take a stand against local data centers.

Red and blue communities are joining together across party and ideological lines. Participants are overwhelmingly non-affluent – working class if you will. While there is little common ideology, there is certainly a widespread ethos based on the idea that wealthy, powerful elite forces are threatening the livelihoods and wellbeing of ordinary people and that people must force government to put a halt to such threats.The outcome of any such movement is unpredictable. It could, like the Tea Party, be captured by rightwing populist elites. It could, like Occupy Wall Street, dissipate in the face of repression and lack of clear direction while leaving a transformed political landscape behind. It could, like the post-Love Canal anti-toxics movement, impose significant limits on corporate depredations through local campaigns and federal legislation. Or it could become part of a far deeper transformation of the political, economic, and social landscape.

One constructive outcome might be for the Data Center Rebellion to converge with an emerging Greentech New Deal. For the past eight years, the Green New Deal has provided a highly popular vision and program that would protect the climate in ways that would create good jobs for working people, end poverty, and alleviate injustice.

The original Green New Deal called for “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal.”

The Green New Deal aimed to save the climate by meeting scientific targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases. It would seek to end the epidemic of poverty by mitigating deeply entrenched racial, regional, and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth and distributing federal aid and other investment equitably to historically impoverished and marginalized communities. And it would provide good jobs constructing a just and climate-safe economy.

A poll soon after it was initially proposed in 2018 found that 40% of registered voters “strongly support” and 41% “somewhat support” the concepts behind the Green New Deal. Another poll five years later in 2024 found that “the Green New Deal is still incredibly popular.”

Since the original proposal for a Green New Deal, the “Greentech revolution” has transformed the cost and viability of fossil free energy.

Today a “Greentech New Deal” can be driven forward by an entirely different economic environment – one in which the transition to fossil free energy is not a costly and painful duty, but rather a “free lunch” that the American people can use to make a happier, healthier, and more just society and world.

Indeed as I have shown elsewhere, that Greentech revolution is driving forward at local and state levels despite opposition from Trump, MAGA, and the fossil fuel industry.

While a convergence of the Data Center Rebellion and the Greentech New Deal is far from inevitable, we can envision some steps that might help lead in that direction:

• Continue and expand the local struggles against data centers. Those struggles have put the issue squarely in the public eye, shown that communities are not powerless, and already blocked a remarkable number of data center proposals. They can take heart from the local struggles to shut down coal-fired power plants which have led to retirement commitments for over 70% of coal plants since 2010.

• Continue and expand the burgeoning coalitions promoting data center bans and moratoriums at city, state, and national levels. Force politicians and elected officials to impose such policies with no ifs, and, or buts.

• Encourage the broad array of forces that backed the Green New Deal, and continue to implement it at local and state levels, to use their considerable power and resources to champion the struggle against data centers.

• Steadily broaden the Data Center Rebellion’s implicit– and often articulated – goal of replacing oligarchic with democratic control of the economy.

• Demand that the “precautionary principle” – that new innovations not be permitted until they are proven harmless — be applied both to data centers and to fossil fuel infrastructure.

• Prioritize the blocking of fossil fuels for data centers.

• Present the Greentech New Deal as an alternative to the billionaire plan to dominate our communities, our economy, and our lives.

• Promote the Greentech New Deal as at once the solution to the climate, the jobs, and the affordability crises.

A handful of hyperscalers are trying to shape the future through AI and the data centers on which they depend. But the future may also be shaped in part by the unprecedented popular mobilization against data centers.

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Jeremy Brecher is a writer, historian, and activist who is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements. Subscribe to Jeremy Brecher on Substack

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09/04/2026

For many, Labor Day signifies a time of transition, the end of summer and the return to business as usual, whether it be school or work. But the holiday weekend was born out of a more radical past, and at a place charged with a history of protest and free expression.

On September 5, 1882, more than 10,000 workers sacrificed a day’s pay to march on Union Square and demand an eight-hour workday and an end to child labor. The success of their protest paved the way for Labor Day to become a federal holiday in 1894.

Initially a gated garden enclave for New York’s wealthiest, architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux redesigned Union Square in 1872 as an open plaza for public assembly and patriotic demonstration.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Union Square became the epicenter of radical American politics, a setting for protests by anarchists and socialists. Noted activist Emma Goldman frequently used the public plaza to challenge government censorship and advocate for women’s reproductive rights and free speech.

Fenced in by Surveillance Technology
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Today, however, Union Square has been fenced in by a barricade of a different sort. Ringing the plaza is a spiky array of cameras, installed on streetlights by a New York Police Department seeking to surveil New Yorkers and anyone else who happens by the square.

The cameras include automatic license-plate recognition technology, which captures data on every car that passes the square down Broadway or across busy 14th Street.

Whether you’re driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk or attending a local No Kings protest, odds are that law enforcement has recorded, processed, and archived your activities for future reference.

Such setups are so ubiquitous to cities and major intersections that they’re easy to dismiss as normal features of a busy streetscape. But that’s changing.

The company that produces many of these surveillance cameras—Flock Group Inc.—has become a focus of concern among activists, advocates, and people of every political stripe who don’t want law enforcement documenting and archiving their every activity.

Spying on the Haystack
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But Flock is not alone. Surveilling everyday Americans is now a multibillion-dollar business that’s growing fast.

Flock has struck license-plate reading camera contracts with 7,000 law-enforcement agencies, accounting for 40% of all such departments nationwide. There are more than 130,000 of these cameras deployed across 49 states, likely at a busy intersection or gathering point near you.

The philosophy behind such mass surveillance is that authorities need to capture data on everyone’s movements to identify those few who step out of line. It’s as though you need to know the habits of every blade of grass in the haystack to cull out the one wayward needle.

If that’s not disturbing enough, there have also been extensive reports of abuse, including local police officers deploying department surveillance technology to stalk romantic interests—including strangers—while innocent people have been thrown in jail based on a misread license plate or an inaccurate biometric scan.

“The constant and ongoing surveillance of people in public places raises serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns,” says Jenna Ruddock, Free Press’ advocacy director. “Even decisions about where to install these cameras map onto well-established practices of racist policing, aside from the fact that facial-detection technology has an alarming track record when attempting to identify people of color.”

Mass Surveillance Is Big Business
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Still, more major tech companies are getting in on the expanding surveillance business. Powerful artificial intelligence companies are marketing AI-enabled video analytics with facial-recognition capacities for real-time threat detection (think Minority Report).

And while Meta doesn’t directly market its Ray-Ban smart glasses to law enforcement, local police departments and immigration agencies have been buying them in bulk via Amazon.

For its part, Amazon is chasing multimillion-dollar contracts to provide law enforcement with cloud infrastructure for data storage, analytics, and biometric systems, including more than $250 million from the Department of Homeland Security to host many of the databases and systems used to track, monitor, and deport immigrants.

Though he once promised that he wouldn’t allow anyone to use company technology to harm people, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is now seeking to profit from mass surveillance. The company is already doing business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement while vying with Amazon and other tech giants for government cloud-computing contracts. Google is also under contract to provide the tech at the center of federal projects to upgrade the “virtual wall” that surveils US borders.

Lost to the Surveillance State
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As more cameras sprout up in more locations, the movement to oppose such government spying is spreading. Dozens of cities across the country have cut ties with Flock over their residents’ data-privacy concerns. People have flocked to public hearings and city council meetings to pressure local elected officials to turn the cameras off. Some have taken matters into their own hands, covering nearby Flock and other surveillance cameras with trash bags—or even cutting down camera-attached light poles with electric saws.

DeFlock, an anti-surveillance activist group, has been mapping locations of Flock and other cameras nationwide. (This author used this tool to identify the many non-Flock surveillance cameras surrounding Union Square).

In August, privacy advocates organized the DeFlock National Week of Action, which featured a series of protests, town halls, and informational events to oppose automated license-plate readers and other mass surveillance technology.

The pushback against local surveillance cameras is occurring alongside the fast-spreading movement to stop the unchecked construction of data centers. There’s a common culprit in both popular uprisings: the unholy alliances struck between Big Tech and government. Others are rightfully suspicious of the billionaire class pushing the rapid, reckless development of advanced AI and surveillance tools without first seeking the consent of surrounding communities.

In Union Square on a recent Monday, I asked local busker Lawrence Kidwell whether he knew what all of the nearby police cameras were about. “The NYPD just wants to listen to my music,” he said.

Perhaps. But the cameras are also in place to discourage other forms of expression and muzzle voices of dissent. Something that Union Square has long welcomed may become lost to the new deprivations of the surveillance state.

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Tim Karr is a senior director at Free Press, the U.S.-based organization that advocates for more just and democratic media.

This piece was originally published at Pressing Issues.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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09/04/2026

A quarter-century has nearly passed since the terrorist attack that killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

During the first seven years after that mass atrocity, Pentagon spending doubled.

The aftermath of 9/11 was also a huge boost for “the intelligence community.” Despite—and because of—their failure to prevent the carnage on that day, the CIA and the National Security Agency as well as 14 smaller spy agencies boomed with enormous jolts of funds.

Along the way, some line items paid for torture that persisted during the George W. Bush presidency under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The most publicized location was Guantánamo on the island of Cuba. There, “the US opened the offshore detention facility in an attempt to evade the rule of law,” the London-based organization Freedom From Torture reports.

“In the name of the US's ‘War on Terror,’ people deemed by the US to be ‘enemy combatants’ were detained at the facility. Many were tortured and denied basic human rights and due process… Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo Bay has imprisoned 780 men and boys from 48 countries…. Yet only 16 detainees have ever been convicted of a crime—just 2 percent.”

Despite public pressure, Bush vetoed a version of the Intelligence Authorization Act in March 2008 that would have required CIA interrogators to adhere to Army Field Manual regulations. As soon as Barack Obama became president, he issued an executive order rescinding the free hand for the CIA director on interrogations that Bush had reaffirmed in a July 2007 order. Obama’s directive removed the CIA’s detention power and required the agency to follow Army Field Manual rules.

Yet five and a half years went by before President Obama acknowledged, in his notable words, “We tortured some folks.” He told a news conference: “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.”

The acknowledgement came four months before the long-awaited release of a report in December 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. While heavily redacted, it was a political indictment of torture. “CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of US law, treaty obligations, and our values,” wrote the committee’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Among the report’s conclusions:

“The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.”

“The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”

“The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”

“Two contract psychologists devised the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Months later, the New England Journal of Medicine summed up aspects of the Senate committee’s findings: “Medical professionals, primarily private contractors, filled four basic roles at the black sites: clearing terrorist suspects as ‘medically fit’ for torture; monitoring torture to prevent death and treat injuries; developing novel torture methods; and actually torturing prisoners.

All these actions were taken only after CIA and US Department of Justice attorneys assured the medical professionals that they had immunity from prosecution and would not be held legally responsible for violating US and international law against torture as long as they used the techniques approved in legal memos (since withdrawn) written to justify their actions.

Lawyers agreed to provide immunity assurances that specific torture techniques were legal ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods only if the physicians assured them that they would be present to prevent permanent harm to prisoners. The CIA opened more than a dozen black sites around the world after 9/11, in which at least 117 prisoners were held; 39 of these prisoners were subjected to one or more torture techniques.”

At least hundreds more “suspected terrorists” who’d been captured by the US were turned over to ruthless governments. “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan,” former CIA officer Bob Baer said. “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.”

When shocking photos emerged of vile mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, a media uproar caused an official probe by two-star Army General Anthonio Taguba.

His report, issued in 2004, concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees."

Taguba’s candor got him pushed into early retirement.

In the preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report in 2008, he addressed the matter of accountability by flatly declaring that ”the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture.”

But in spite of the voluminous evidence that documented high-level approval of methodical torture, not a single US official went to prison as a result. Foreshadowing such impunity was a comment by Obama nine days before he became president in January 2009. On national television, he voiced “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” The words that came next were even more telling: “And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.”

The lack of accountability set a template. As president, Obama continued with his theme of governance without a rear-view mirror. On October 25, 2012, he tweeted: "We don't look backwards, we look forward." Career outlooks were bright for top CIA officials who’d been implicated in Bush-era torture.

“Much has been made of President Trump’s disregard for rules and norms—boundaries delineated by ethics and morality if not written laws themselves,” Adam Serwer wrote in March 2018. “But transgressing laws, rules, and norms isn’t the only way to destroy them. Another way is simply not to enforce them. In that regard, the 44th president, Barack Obama, bears a measure of responsibility for the recklessness of his successor, in particular Trump’s decision to appoint Gina Haspel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy director, to run the agency itself.”

Haspel became the CIA’s director in 2018 when confirmed by the Senate despite her key role in the CIA’s torture program. Citing declassified documents, the National Security Archive at George Washington University explained that she “personally supervised the torture of a CIA detainee in 2002 leading to at least three waterboard sessions, subsequently drafted the cable that ordered destruction of the videotape evidence of torture, and served as a senior CIA official while the Agency was lying to itself, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the Congress, and the public about the effectiveness of torture in eliciting useful intelligence.”

The Center for Victims of Torture points out that “architects and operators of the CIA torture program have risen to prestigious positions in government, the private sector, the federal judiciary and academia.” And so it was after president-elect Joe Biden nominated Avril Haines to be Director of National Intelligence. As Obama’s CIA deputy director, she had worked to impede the Senate committee investigation into torture.

“In 2015, Haines had to decide what to do about CIA officials who had hacked into the computers of Senate intelligence committee staffers who had been compiling a comprehensive report on torture, and even drummed up spurious criminal cases against them,” the Guardian reported. “She overrode the advice of the CIA inspector general and recommended against disciplinary action.” The lead researcher for that committee, Daniel J. Jones (who was portrayed by Adam Driver in the movie “The Report”), warned against Biden going through with the nomination, saying: “This is about the continuing cover-up of the torture program, the long legacy of that. And I wish I could say Haines wasn’t a part of that, but she was.” The Senate confirmed Haines to the DNI job with an 84-10 vote. She remained in the position throughout Biden’s presidency.

Three months ago, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace announced that its next president will be Avril Haines. The organization declared: “One of the most respected national security leaders of her generation, Avril brings a deep commitment to public service and the values at the heart of our mission.”

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Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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