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The cardinal is traveling with CNEWA board member Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre; CNEWA President Msgr. John Kozar; and executive director of Catholic Charities for the New York archdiocese, Msgr. Kevin Sullivan.
According to the press release, the purpose of this pastor visit is fourfold:
Demonstrate solidarity with the families — many of whom are Christian — displaced when ISIS swept through northern Iraq in summer 2014. The delegation will visit displaced families taking refuge in camps and villages; stop at schools, nurseries and clinics serving their needs; and pray together in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy.
Show gratitude and solidarity with the caregivers — the priests, sisters and laity who, although displaced as well, have responded in meeting the needs of those expelled by ISIS. The pastoral visit will highlight the efforts of the religious sisters and parish priests who have partnered with CNEWA in setting up schools, nurseries and clinics.
Demonstrate solidarity with and support for the leadership of the local church. The delegation will spend time with the patriarchs and bishops of the Chaldean and Syriac Catholic churches, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East.
Assert the Christian commitment to support all those wounded by ISIS: Christian, Muslim and Yazidi.
BBC: A group of Christians in Iraq have formed their own militia to protect people from the so-called Islamic State group. The leader of the Babylon Brigade says they were left with no choice but to take up arms when IS fighters targeted Christians.
There’s a striking picture on the wall. It shows an untarmacked road, scorched by sunlight, leading to a small village with a mountain range behind it. And all along the side of the road there are crosses every 100m – taller even than lamp posts.
“Christian village,” a guard mumbles. “Near Mosul.”
We are in the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraq Christian Resistance, Babylon Brigade. They are a militia, although they prefer the phrase popular mobilisation unit. Whatever the language, about 30 of these outfits have sprung up in the past couple of years and between them they have 100,000 armed volunteers. They were formed to block the advance of the so-called Islamic State group when it swept through north and west Iraq in 2014, even threatening Baghdad. When the Iraqi national army collapsed the militias stood firm.
Getty: Shia fighters from a popular mobilisation unit hold a position north of Baghdad, June 2015
Most are Shia Muslim. A handful are Sunni Muslim, one is Christian – the Babylon Brigade.
The other pictures on the wall are photographs, all depicting the Babylon Brigade’s leader and the man I have come to meet, Rayan Al-Kildani. Kildani in military fatigues, Kildani with shades, Kildani meeting some important people, Kildani looking contemplative, Kildani looking determined.
And then the man himself arrives with a small entourage, most of them in suits but one young man with a wispy beard is in military clothing.
I’m not sure how seriously to take Kildani. The militias have persuaded the central government to cover their expenses and as a result they are, taken altogether, receiving about $1.4bn (£1bn) a year. For a militia leader like Kildani it’s more than $600 (£450) per man per month. Good money. There are stories about people renting a house in Baghdad, gathering a few people together, announcing they have formed a militia and going to the government to apply for the funds.
“How many men have you got?” I ask.
“That’s a military secret,” he says.
Really? I saw another man from the militias the day before and he was quite open about numbers. I’d been a little surprised when that militiaman apologised for his English saying it should have been better given that he was from Wembley in North London.
“Really, Wembley? By the football ground?” I had said.
“Yes, my wife and children are still there.”
Anyway he’d seemed happy to talk numbers. So I press Kildani again.
“Hundreds of men or thousands?”
“Many.”
“Weapons?”
“Rockets,” he says. “Medium ones. This is war. You can’t fight a war with rifles.”
“So, a Christian militia,” I remark.
“What Islamic State was doing to the Christians is terrible,” he says. “They are the devil.”
“Your militia has fought?”
“We fight side by side with the Muslim militias,” he says, claiming: “We are the first Christian power in Iraqi history.”
And then: “I know the Bible says that if you get hit on one cheek you should offer the other. But we have really good defence forces now. No-one is going to do anything bad to the Christians. Some Christians had their homes taken over. I have personally been to those houses to tell the new people living there to get out. Christian suffering is over.”
One of his four phones rings. He glances at the incoming number, grunts and gives it to someone to answer.
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption A Christian militiaman patrols through the abandoned streets of Telskuf, November, 2015
“What about the commandment: Thou shalt not kill?” I ask.
“You are a Christian?” Kildani asks, somewhat doubtfully.
“Church of England,” I offer.
Kildani nods as if that explains it.
“He’s a Protestant,” someone says with a note of disapproval. “Sectarianism runs deep in Iraq,” I think. But of course I don’t say that.
Kildani turns to me again: “We have to fight. We have to defend ourselves.”
And then, to my surprise, he adds: “Jesus himself told us that if you don’t have a sword you should go out and buy one.”
I cast my mind back to my schooldays of Bible study but can’t remember Jesus telling people to arm themselves.
“Did he really say that?”
“It’s in the Bible,” Kildani insists.
“Matthew,” one man says. “Luke,” says another. “Matthew and Luke,” they both say. I looked doubtful.
Kildani glances over to one of his assistants who is playing a game on his phone.
“Find it!” he orders.
The young man with the phone walks over to me. He has the verse on his screen in Arabic.
It is Luke chapter 22, verse 36: “If you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.”
Turns out theologians have been arguing about the verse for centuries. Is that a real sword? Or a metaphorical one? Kildani is in no doubt. He says he and his men are out on patrol. And they’re armed.
Duane R. Clarridge, a pugnacious American spy who helped found the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, was indicted and later pardoned for his role in the Iran-contra scandal, and resumed his intelligence career in his late 70s as the head of a private espionage operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, died on Saturday in Leesburg, Va. He was 83.
His lawyer, Raymond Granger, said the cause was complications of laryngeal and esophageal cancer.
Mr. Clarridge was an unflinching champion of a brawny American foreign policy and of the particular role played by the C.I.A.’s clandestine service — a cadre he likened to a secret army that “marches for the president” and ought to be subjected to as little outside scrutiny as possible.
Mr. Clarridge, widely known by his nickname Dewey, delighted in the role of rogue. He often arrived at work in white Italian suits or safari jackets and bragged to other C.I.A. officers about the brilliant ideas he had conceived while drinking the previous night.
“If you have a tough, dangerous job, critical to national security, Dewey’s your man,” Robert M. Gates, the former director of central intelligence and later defense secretary, was quoted as saying in “Casey,” a 1990 biography of William J. Casey, the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief during the Reagan administration, by Joseph E. Persico. “Just make sure you have a good lawyer at his elbow — Dewey’s not easy to control.”
He spent years overseas as an undercover officer, but perhaps his most consequential effort at the spy agency was the creation of the Counterterrorism Center (then called the Counterterrorist Center) in 1986 after a string of attacks the previous year, including the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the massacres at El Al ticket counters in Rome and Vienna carried out by the Abu Nidal Organization.
Up to that point, the C.I.A. had devoted little effort to understanding international terrorism, and Mr. Clarridge persuaded Mr. Casey to create the center with an unusual arrangement: having undercover spies and intelligence analysts working together to try to dismantle terrorist networks. Within a year, C.I.A. operations had significantly weakened the Abu Nidal organization.
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Counterterrorism Center has grown into a behemoth, the heart of a spy agency transformed by years of terrorist hunting.
Mr. Clarridge’s efforts against international terrorism came as he was becoming ensnared by investigations into the Reagan administration’s efforts to use proceeds from secret arms sales to Iran to arm the contras, a Nicaraguan rebel group battling troops of the country’s socialist government, known as the Sandinistas.
Mr. Clarridge had been in charge of the C.I.A.’s covert war in Nicaragua in the early 1980s (he told his colleagues that his idea to mine the harbors of Nicaragua in 1983 came while he was drinking gin at home) and had developed a close relationship with Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was running the Iran-contra operation from his perch at the National Security Council.
According to the final report by Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel investigating the Iran-contra affair, Mr. Clarridge testified that he had no knowledge that cargo ships sent to Iran to help secure the release of American hostages contained any weapons. He also denied trying to solicit money from foreign countries to circumvent a congressional prohibition against financing the contras.
“In both instances,” the report said, “there was strong evidence that Clarridge’s testimony was false.”
He was indicted on a charge of perjury in 1991, three years after he had retired from the agency. President George Bush pardoned him on Christmas Eve 1992, along with five other Iran-contra figures. He had the pardon framed, and he eventually hung it in the front hallway of his home near San Diego so it would be the first thing visitors saw upon entering his house.
But the scandal embittered him, and he used his 1997 memoir, “A Spy for All Seasons,” to settle some old scores. He lamented in the book that the C.I.A. had lost its swagger since the end of the Cold War, becoming a risk-averse organization that was beholden to lawyers and was degenerating “into something resembling the style, work ethic and morale of the post office.”
Duane Ramsdell Clarridge was born in Nashua, N.H., on April 16, 1932. Both of his parents (his father was a dentist and his mother a homemaker) were active in local Republican politics, and the nickname he carried through life had Republican origins. According to his memoir, a neighbor in Nashua began calling him Dewey in 1944 in honor of Thomas E. Dewey, the New York governor who that year ran for president against Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He joined the C.I.A. in 1955, after getting degrees from Brown and Columbia, and served undercover in Nepal, India and Italy before being promoted to run the Latin America division in 1981.
He is survived by a daughter, Cassandra; two sons, Ian and Tarik; and five grandchildren. His first marriage ended in divorce; his second wife, Helga, died before him.
More than two decades after his retirement from the C.I.A., Mr. Clarridge began working as a government contractor when military officials in Kabul hired him and a small team to gather information about militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Using sources in the region — he identified them only by cover names, such as Waco and Willi — he would turn their field dispatches into reports he sent to the military command by encrypted email.
Mr. Clarridge worked for a security firm hired by The New York Times in December 2008 to assist in seeking the release of a reporter, David Rohde, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban. Mr. Rohde escaped on his own seven months later, but Mr. Clarridge used his role in the episode to promote his spy network to military officials.
The Pentagon canceled the contract in 2010 after the private spying operation was revealed.
But two years later, after Mr. Clarridge had moved into a retirement home in Northern Virginia, he told a reporter that he still had his “network” intact for the future.
In November 2015, Mr. Clarridge was back in the news when The Times identified him as an adviser to Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and Republican candidate for president, who had come under criticism for statements he made about foreign affairs during debates. Asked about the candidate’s foreign policy acumen, Mr. Clarridge was typically impolitic.
“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” he said.
FreeBeacon: The address “1209 North Orange Street” in Wilmington, Del., has become known in recent years as the epicenter of U.S. corporate secrecy. The squat, split-level building is the official address of over 285,000 companies, many of which are looking to take advantage of Delaware’s Panama-like secrecy rules, tax incentives, and business-friendly case law.
In the wake of the recent “Panama Papers” scandal, this unassuming brick office has received renewed scrutiny from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Telegraph, and advocates for corporate tax reform.
But one of its tenants may come as a surprise—a company owned by Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Hillary and Bill Clinton quietly set up two shell companies listed at “1209 North Orange Street” in 2008 and 2013, the Washington Free Beacon has found. The names of the companies, but not their location, were first made public in tax filings released by Hillary Clinton last year.
According to records, one of the Clintons’ “1209 North Orange Street” companies is WJC, LLC, which was set up by Bill Clinton in 2008 as a pass-through for his consulting fees.
Another company at the same location, ZFS Holdings, LLC, was set up in February 2013, one week after Hillary Clinton left the State Department. Hillary Clinton received $5.5 million from her book publisher, Simon & Schuster, through the company.
The “1209 North Orange Street” building is the headquarters for the Corporation Trust Company. The firm acts as a registered agent for thousands of corporations that are not actually located in Delaware, including the Clintons’ companies.
Anti-secrecy advocates say the building is prime evidence that Delaware has become a corporate haven that’s comparable to more well-known, offshore locales.
“If you imagined a building with 1,000 corporations in it, you’d imagine a building like the Empire State building,” said Richard Phillips, a senior policy analyst with Citizens for Tax Justice. “But apparently 285,000 companies claim [1209 North Orange Street] is their address.”
“What this shows is this is not really the address of companies that are doing real business. This is the address of a lot of companies that are just shell companies,” he added. “In this case, it doesn’t even look like they have mailboxes. They just claim that address as the places they’re doing business, even though they’re not doing business there.”
Similar registered agents have come under scrutiny in recent years. While campaigning in 2008, President Obama slammed the “Ugland House,” a five-story building in the Cayman Islands that is reportedly home to over 18,000 companies.
“That’s either the biggest building in the world, or the biggest tax scam on record,” said Obama.
The Clinton campaign declined to comment on why the Clintons, who live in New York and have no evident residential ties to Delaware, set up companies in the state. But the presidential candidate isn’t alone. Experts say Delaware is the most popular place to register a company in the United States, due in part to its established system of business case law and tax incentives for intellectual property and real estate holdings.
One of the biggest draws may be the state’s lack of disclosure requirements—businesses can be created completely anonymously, allowing the owners to avoid public detection and even hide income from U.S. authorities.
According to advocates for corporate tax reform, Delaware’s laws rival well-known secrecy havens like the Cayman Islands and Panama.
“General secrecy laws and the ability of these corporations to hide the identities of those who own it, that’s what makes [Delaware] an onshore tax haven, and that’s what makes it just as bad as the Cayman Islands,” said Phillips.
Hillary Clinton has promised to crack down on tax havens on the campaign trail. Referring to the Panama Papers last Wednesday, Clinton condemned “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere.”
The Clinton Foundation also has three shell companies in Delaware, according to its amended financial disclosures released last year.
One is the Acceso Fund, LLC, which was registered by the Corporation Trust Company at 1209 North Orange Street in 2009. The Clinton Foundation has used the company to channel money to its Colombia-based private equity fund, Fondo Acceso.
The private equity fund, which is run out of the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office, has invested in telecom and food processing companies in Colombia, the Free Beaconreported last November.
Another Clinton Foundation company, Acceso Worldwide Fund, Inc., was registered in 2013 by the Corporation Services Company, located in Wilmington, Delaware.
A third company, the Haiti Development Fund, LLC, was registered in 2010 by National Corporate Research, Ltd, located in Dover.
In Delaware, limited liability companies such as WJC, LLC, and ZFS, LLC, are not required to file annual statements disclosing their directors or owners. The Clintons also registered both companies in New York after they were established.
There is no evidence the Clintons are using the entities for any nefarious purposes, and it is perfectly legal for non-residents to set up corporations in Delaware. But even if corporations stay within the law, critics say Delaware shell companies can sometimes be used to legally circumvent taxes in other states.
According to a report published last December by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Delaware’s popularity as a hub for shell companies is “responsible for the loss of billions of dollars in revenue in other U.S. states.”
“It’s legal tax avoidance,” said Phillips. “We would say it’s immoral, or not the best thing for the country.”
Anti-secrecy advocates also say the laws make it easier for criminals to evade federal taxes or finance terrorism, all under the radar of the public and U.S. authorities.
“Some anonymous shell companies have financed terrorism and supported corruption and human trafficking and Delaware is a traditional hub for creating these fake companies,” said Andrew Hanauer, campaign director at the Jubilee USA Network.
Jubilee USA Network and other groups have been advocating for legislative reform. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), and Rep. Carolyn Maloney recently put forward legislation that would force U.S. companies to disclose their actual owners.
The Clinton campaign did comment on whether Hillary Clinton supports the legislation. The campaign also did not comment on whether she or Bill Clinton have any other companies registered in Delaware.
But the concerns over corporate secrecy and tax avoidance have trickled into the Democratic presidential race, with Sen. Bernie Sanders incorporating it into his stump speeches. Clinton has also railed against tax havens on the trail and vowed to take action.
“Some of you may have just heard about these disclosures about outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere,” said Clinton during a campaign event last Wednesday.
“Now some of this behavior is clearly against the law, and anyone who violates the law anywhere should be held accountable,” she added. “But it’s also scandalous how much is actually legal.”
U.S.Treasury: We are committed to defending human rights and advancing democratic governance in Venezuela through the use of financial sanctions.
We will use these tools to target those persons involved in violence against anti-government protesters, serious human rights abuses, and those involved in the arrest or prosecution of individuals for their legitimate exercise of free speech.
Corrupt actions by Venezuelan government officials deprive Venezuela of needed economic resources that could be invested in the Venezuelan people and used to spur economic growth. These actions also undermine the public trust in democratic institutions and the human rights to which Venezuelan citizens are entitled. This Executive Order will be used to protect the U.S. financial system from the illicit financial flows from public corruption in Venezuela.
CNN: The cash-strapped country could default by next year when lots of debt payments are due. Venezuela’s reserves, which are mostly made up of gold, have fallen sharply this year as the country needs cash to pay off debt and tries to maintain its social welfare programs.
Venezuela owes about $15.8 billion in debt payments between now and the end of 2016.
But it doesn’t have enough to make good on its payments. Venezuela only has $15.2 billion in foreign reserves — the lowest amount since 2003. A lot of those reserves are in gold.
Less than $1 billion of Venezuela’s reserves are in cash, and it has a couple billion in reserves at the IMF.
Police arrest students during a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in San Cristobal. Two officers died and four more were hurt
FT: At the main morgue of central Caracas, the stench forces everyone to cover their nostrils. “Now things are worse than ever,” says Yuli Sánchez. “They kill people and no one is punished while families have to keep their pain to themselves.”
Ms Sánchez’s 14-year-old nephew, Oliver, was shot five times by malandros, or thugs, while riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle. His uncle, Luis Mejía, remarked that in a fortnight three members of their family had been shot, including two youths who were shot by police.
An economic, social and political crisis facing Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s unpopular president, is being aggravated by a rise in violence which is prompting fears that this oil-rich country risks becoming a failed state.
“What can we do?” Mr Mejía asks. “Give up.” The morgue employee in charge of handling the corpses notes that a decade ago he received seven or eight bodies every weekend. These days, he says, that number has risen to between 40 and 50: “This is now wilder than the wild west.”
Critics say that the Venezuelan government is increasingly unable to provide citizens with water, electricity, health or a functioning economy which can supply basic food staples or indispensable medicines, let alone personal safety.
Last month alone, Venezuelans learned of the summary execution of at least 17 gold miners supposedly by a mining Mafia, the killing of two police officers allegedly by a group of students who drove a bus into a barricade, and a hostage drama inside a prison at the hands of a grenade-wielding criminal gang. On Wednesday, three policemen were killed when an armed gang busted a member out of a lock-up in the capital.
At least 10 were killed in a Caracas shanty town after a confrontation between local thugs armed with assault rifles, while a local mayor was gunned down outside his home in Trujillo state last month. There are widespread reports of lynchings.
All this is creating a broad unease that Mr Maduro is unable to maintain order. Venezuela has the world’s fastest inflation and its dire recession is worsening. Mr Maduro last week declared every Friday a holiday for the next two months to save electricity as a prolonged drought has exacerbated chronic power shortages. There is a lack of basic goods. Analysts warn that the economic crisis risks turning in to a humanitarian one.
The evidence of state failure is very concrete in the country that sits on top of the world’s largest oil reserves– Moisés Naím, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
“Failed state is a nebulous concept often used too lightly. That’s not the case with today’s Venezuela,” says Moisés Naím a Venezuelan distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The evidence of state failure is very concrete in the country that sits on top of the world’s largest oil reserves.”
Venezuela is already one of the world’s deadliest countries. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a local think-tank, says the murder rate rose last year to 92 killings per 100,000 residents. The attorney-general cites a lower figure of 58 homicides per 100,000.
In 1998, a year before former leader Hugo Chávez took office, the rate was 19 per 100,000, says the think-tank’s director Roberto Briceño León, adding that after 17 years of socialist “revolution”, it is the poor who make up most of the victims.
“I think it is evident that the Venezuelan state cannot act as a state in many areas of the country, so it could be considered failed,” says Mr Briceño, adding that the state now “lacks a monopoly on violence”.
But the state is indeed to blame for some of that violence, according to a report by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and the Venezuelan Human Rights Education-Action Programme presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
“Venezuelans are facing one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere and urgently need effective protection from violent crime,” said José Miguel Vivanco HRW’s Americas director. “But in multiple raids throughout the country, the security forces themselves have allegedly committed serious abuses.”
Their findings show that police and military raids in low-income and immigrant communities in Venezuela have led to widespread allegations of abuse, including extrajudicial killings, mass arbitrary detentions, maltreatment of detainees, forced evictions, the destruction of homes, and arbitrary deportations.
Country’s bitter power struggle reflects institutional weakness across the region
The government usually blames violence within its borders on Colombian rightwing paramilitaries engaged in a war against its revolution. But as David Smilde and Hugo Pérez Hernáiz of the Washington Office on Latin America, a think-tank, recently wrote: “Attributing violence in Venezuela to paramilitary activity has been a common rhetorical move used by the government over the past year, effectively making a citizen security problem into a national security problem.”
For many Venezuelans it no longer matters who is to blame. “It is a state policy of letting anarchy sink in,” says a former policeman outside the gates of a compound in Caracas.
That former police station now houses the Frente 5 de Marzo, one of the political groups that consider themselves the keepers of socialism’s sacred flame. The gates bear the colours of the Venezuelan flag and are marked with bullet holes. The man believes there is something akin to a civil war going on.
“Venezuela is pure chaos now. It seems to me there is no way back,” he says.
****
Iran has been outsourcing for many years and that includes to Iran:
Iran’s ambassador to Venezuela said Tuesday that a check worth about $70 million, found by German authorities in the luggage of Iran’s former central bank chief, was going to be used by an Iranian company for its expenses while building public housing in Venezuela.
Iranian Ambassador Hojattolah Soltani made the remarks in an interview with the Venezuelan television channel Globovision, saying the check for 300 million Venezuelan bolivars was to be used for the expenses of the Kayson Company, a Tehran-based construction business that is building thousands of homes for the Venezuelan government.
The Iranian ambassador noted that the man with the check whom German authorities stopped last month is not currently a government official. Soltani said that Tahmasb Mazaheri, a former chief of Iran’s central bank and former economy minister, has been working as an adviser to the Iranian company.
Venezuelan authorities had to comment on the issue, and stressed that everything was above board (link is external). The Iranian Ambassador to Caracas would later recant his opinion, as cited by AP above, saying about the caught check-courier (link is external) “[he] is by no means an official of the Government (of Iran); neither has his name been affixed to the confiscated check”, and adding that the check “was signed in Iran and Mr. Mazaheri was on his way to Venezuela to bring the check to cash it in Banco Venezuela.”
Bloomberg: The Competitive Enterprise Institute is getting subpoenaed by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands to cough up its communications regarding climate change. The scope of the subpoena is quite broad, covering the period from 1997 to 2007, and includes, according to CEI, “a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information.”
My first reaction to this news was “Um, wut?” CEI has long denied humans’ role in global warming, and I have fairly substantial disagreements with CEI on the issue. However, when last I checked, it was not a criminal matter to disagree with me. It’s a pity, I grant you, but there it is; the law’s the law.
(I pause to note, in the interests of full disclosure, that before we met, my husband briefly worked for CEI as a junior employee. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)
Speaking of the law, why on earth is CEI getting subpoenaed? The attorney general, Claude Earl Walker, explains: “We are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent market where consumers can make informed choices about what they buy and from whom. If ExxonMobil has tried to cloud their judgment, we are determined to hold the company accountable.”
That wasn’t much of an explanation. It doesn’t mention any law that ExxonMobil may have broken. It is also borderline delusional, if Walker believes that ExxonMobil’s statements or non-statements about climate change during the period 1997 to 2007 appreciably affected consumer propensity to stop at a Mobil station, rather than tootling down the road to Shell or Chevron, or giving up their car in favor of walking to work.
State attorneys general including Walker held a press conference last week to talk about the investigation of ExxonMobil and explain their theory of the case. And yet, there sort of wasn’t a theory of the case. They spent a lot of time talking about global warming, and how bad it was, and how much they disliked fossil fuel companies. They threw the word “fraud” around a lot. But the more they talked about it, the more it became clear that what they meant by “fraud” was “advocating for policies that the attorneys general disagreed with.”
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman gave the game away when he explained that they would be pursuing completely different theories in different jurisdictions — some under pension laws, some consumer protection, some securities fraud. It is traditional, when a crime has actually been committed, to first establish that a crime has occurred, and then identify a perpetrator. When prosecutors start running that process backwards, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re looking at prosecutorial power run amok.
And that approaches certainty when attorneys general start sending subpoenas to think tanks that ExxonMobil might have supported. What exactly would the subpoena prove? That ExxonMobil supported opinions about climate change? That the opinions tended to be congruent with its own interests? That this opinion might have been wrong, and if so, might have encouraged wrong beliefs in others? This is a description of, roughly, every person or organization in the history of the world, not excluding attorneys general. It’s also not illegal. Especially since, as the New York Times points out, “the company published extensive research over decades that largely lined up with mainstream climatology.” This isn’t preventing consumers from buying into a Ponzi scheme; it’s an attempt to criminalize advocacy.
I support action on climate change for the same reason I buy homeowner’s, life and disability insurance: because the potential for catastrophe is large. But that doesn’t mean I’m entitled to drive people who disagree with me from the public square. Climate activists have an unfortunate tendency to try to do just that, trying to brand dissenters as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.
It’s an understandable impulse. It seems easier to shut down dissenters than to persuade people to stop consuming lots and lots of energy-intensive goods and services.
But history has had lots and lots of existentially important debates. If you thought that only the One True Church could save everyone from Hell, the Reformation was the most existentially important debate in human history. If you thought that Communist fifth columnists were plotting to turn the U.S. into Soviet Russia, that was also pretty existentially important. We eventually realized that it was much better to have arguments like these with words, rather than try to suppress one side of them by force of law.
Unfortunately those who wield the law forget that lesson, and we get cases like the CEI subpoena, intended to silence debate by hounding one side. The attorney general doesn’t even need to have the law on his side; the process itself can be the punishment, as victims are forced to spend immense amounts on legal fees, and immense time and money on complying with investigations. (And if the law were on the attorney general’s side in a case like this, then that’s a terrible law, and it should be overturned.)
Prosecutors know the damage they can do even when they don’t have a leg to stand on. The threat of investigation can coerce settlements even in weak cases.
The enemies of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and ExxonMobil should hold their applause. In a liberal democracy, every guerrilla tactic your side invents will eventually be used against you. Imagine a coalition of Republican attorneys general announcing an investigation of companies that have threatened state boycotts over gay-rights issues, and you may get a sense of why this is not such a good precedent to set.
The rule of law, and our norms about free speech, represent a sort of truce between both sides. We all agree to let other people talk, because we don’t want to live in a world where we ourselves are not free to speak. Because we do not want to be silenced by an ambitious prosecutor, we should all be vigilant when ambitious prosecutors try to silence anyone else.
Image copyright Getty Images
