Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Reclaiming “Send Her Back”: A Call for Black Americans to Voyage to Africa

When it comes to being Black, queer and immigrant in America, there is no safety. The countless violent attacks on people of color, the lack of action against guns after repeated mass shootings and the unrelenting excuses for assailants who are predominantly white and male point to a sinister truth about America: Violence and murder founded this nation and remain deeply entrenched in the state ideology. The president has reinforced this ideology by inciting anti-Black and anti-immigrant sentiment through the call for ICE raids and a border wall and shouts for American-born, non-white government officials to go back to their countries.

While the president’s comment was undoubtedly meant as an insulting erasure of the foundational legacy and heritage of Indigenous, Black and Latinx people in America, the recent mass shootings have convinced me that some of us should return to our origin country—but not for the reason Trump suggests. As a Black American, I had no idea what traveling to the motherland would mean for my life. Now that I’ve gone, it is my sincerest belief that we as people of the diaspora in America owe it to ourselves to travel to Africa, to touch the land where our people were ripped from the shore, to experience what it’s like to live in a place where Blackness is celebrated, without fear and racism.

When I became a mother in America, my sense of fear was heightened because I was now living from the lens of a Black woman with a sensitive and wildly curious Black son. I remember watching the case of Trayvon Martin closely; my son Akeim was only 10 months old the day George Zimmerman was acquitted for Trayvon’s death, and it broke me down into a haze of heartache and rage. At the time, I was in the first months of building BYP100, a political organization for young Black people dedicated to fighting for the liberation of all Black people, with several of my comrades including Charlene Carruthers, Rose Afriyie, Malcolm London and Jasson Perez. Even while grieving, we knew that centering ourselves in joy was the medicine for the evil that trailed us throughout our American experience. We decided our first event would be a celebration of life for Trayvon at our headquarters on the south side of Chicago. Such events were the balm for the moments of anguish brought on with each shooting of an unarmed Black woman, child, trans person and man. We understood our joy was a major tool in resisting despair and continuing the fight to live freely.

Out of this understanding, BYP100 member Jonathan Lykes founded the Black Joy Experience Ensemble, a cultural production and performance group utilizing old tools of movement, such as chants and songs, to politicize and honor our spirit as resilient and creative people of the sun. As members of the Ensemble, Jonathan and I were invited to join an international delegation to Ghana where we would attend their annual Pan-African festival PANAFEST during the historic Year of Return, a decree made by the Ghanian government to commemorate the 400 years since the first documented African was brought to Jamestown, Va. as a slave. I spent two weeks building relationships with youth, elders, government officials, activists and artists, sharing collective stories about our experience as Black people and what it means to have Black joy across the diaspora.

The welcoming I felt in Ghana was like nothing I’d ever experienced in my twenty-something years as a Black American. For two nights I was hosted in Lomé, Togo, by a dear friend Dossé-Via Trenou-Wells, founder of Magic and Melanin, and one night we had an intergenerational and multilingual conversation with Black people from America, Togo, Ghana, Senegal, France and London, on how we experience joy to combat oppression. We talked about the importance of being in a warm climate, the presence of music in the streets, the pleasure of a stranger smiling and saying hello to you and the familiar energy we immediately felt upon meeting each other. In thinking about how to strengthen our bond as people of the diaspora, there were some critical realizations around our forced separation. I was amazed that many of my continental African kin were not made aware of the enslavement of African Americans. And likewise, I hold a surface-level knowledge of the colonization of the different African nations. As we talked and ate and translated across Ewe, French, Mina and English, our bond as a group grew closer. One brother from Togo said it was his first time being a room where a group was talking about Blackness and it made him feel thirsty for more. I believe this kind of happening was able to take place because we had the luxury of being together unhindered by violence and overt racism by white people.

Days before I returned home from Ghana, a sister of mine back in Chicago sent me a report of two mothers from the anti-violence group MASK killed in a drive-by shooting while monitoring their community. The news jolted me out my serene time in Ghana and drew me back home to Chicago and my concern for my son and daughter. As I called my children’s fathers, all I could think about was getting me and my babies somewhere, anywhere safe to live. On the last day of the trip, my fellow comrade announced to our group that there had been a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, with 22 people murdered and 26 others injured, some of whom wouldn’t go to the hospital out of fear because they are undocumented. Before I could process El Paso, we got word of yet another mass shooting with nine more murdered and 27 injured in Dayton, Ohio, not far from my hometown of Cleveland, where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was murdered in 2014.

The news of these recent shootings provoked a deep anxiety in me, mainly because I was not surprised at all to hear it. I am still reeling from the deaths of the The Charleston 9 and those killed and harmed at Pulse nightclub. But it’s deeply unsettling to realize that in the past 10 years I have grown wary but accustomed to the targeted murder of people of color and Black people by police and vigilantes with white supremacist agendas.

I was not eager to return to America. In Ghana, I noticed a striking difference as I was walking around Osu or Cape Coast: Everywhere I went, I had no fear of being harassed or suffering from the demoralizing effects of constant microaggressions, because I was a part of the majority. The concept of “Black love” or “Black hair” or Black anything holds no resonance with locals because it would be redundant. My Blackness was at ease on the continent. I felt safe in a way I didn’t know existed, and now I know this is how I am supposed to feel all the time.

After hearing about the shootings, I went to social media to see the same discourse I knew too well: We should send thoughts and prayers, the shooters are mentally unstable and were apprehended without incident. I saw another post about a Black man who was pistol whipped around the same time without any mainstream media attention. When the singer Ari Lennox went live on Instagram to express her anxiety around living in America, the fear of being in a movie theater or taking her nephew to daycare, it hit me again how blessed I’d been to shed this fear for my personal safety for a couple of weeks. I was struck by how Ari Lennox or my friend Jonathan or myself are otherwise full of joy and life but are constantly disrupted by the hatred of white supremacy.

In returning to the motherland I found so much opportunity to settle into a place of Black joy, and I’m encouraged by how rapidly this joy has been spreading into Black America as well. When Black Panther came out I remember all the viral videos of Black Americans adorned in kente and dashikis dancing as they left the theaters. I felt the same energy with the release of the live-action The Lion King and Beyoncé’s love letter to Africa with her production of the movie's soundtrack, The Gift. The celebrated performances of Burna Boy and Mr. Eazi at Coachella, Tobe Nwigwe, a first generation Nigerian-American repping Houston, are all examples of a widely increasing afro-fusion.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are realizing we’re more familiar than we may have thought. And this cross-cultural exchange is not only possible but critical to our continued resistance to a global attack on Blackness.

I am not romanticizing a neat transition into a Pan-African world; it is extremely difficult for our continental relatives to get to the states and the cost of travel even for Black Americans with blue passport books can be prohibitive. However, with social media to connect us and a will to learn, we can begin to heal our distance from our kin. And there are organizations being created for the sole purpose of granting scholarships for people of the diaspora to return home. I invite all my Black people to learn about W.E.B. Du Bois’ sojourn to Ghana and his relationship to Ghana’s first prime minister, the great Kwame Nkrumah, and how Du Bois’ renounced his American citizenship to remain in Ghana. To take the time to learn some Twi and most importantly get in right relationship with the land we were stolen from and begin a process of healing our lost kinship.

So yes, we should all go back. Not because white supremacists don’t want us here but because of our own self-love and self-determination. We need to debunk the myth that our places of origin are third-world shitholes and reclaim our legacy as the richest, most generative and creative beings on this earth. We come from the bastion of the world’s natural resources and our collective melanin is just the vibranium we need to heal ourselves and continue the fight for Black people all over the world.

Some good news. I hope this lawsuit happens. #deletefacebook

https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/facebook-could-face-billions-in-potential-damages-as-court-rules-facial-recognition-lawsuit-can-proce/

Report: Apple Has Activated Software Locks on iPhone Batteries to Discourage Third-Party Repairs
https://gizmodo.com/report-apple-has-activated-software-locks-on-iphone-ba-1837053225 #librem5

Today Linux Journal shut its doors for good. All staff were laid off and the company is left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity... https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication-awkward-goodbye

Chicago Teachers Are Threatening to Strike Against New Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Here’s Why.

In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) took to the streets with thousands of supporters in a seven-day strike that was ultimately seen as a victory against “Mayor 1%” Rahm Emanuel.

A lot has changed since then. The recent wave of teachers strikes and walkouts across the country—from West Virginia to California—has won significant gains, not only in compensation for teachers but also in student resources and overall respect for public education. Back in Chicago, Emanuel and his hand-picked corporate school board have been replaced by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a black lesbian whose campaign platform on education largely mirrored the CTU’s agenda, and a school board comprised largely of educators and community leaders.

Second Circuit Rules That Section 230 Bars Civil Terrorism Claims Against Facebook

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last week became the first federal appellate court to rule that Section 230 bars civil terrorism claims against a social media company. The plaintiffs, who were victims of Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, argued that Facebook should be liable for hosting content posted by Hamas members, which allegedly inspired the attackers who ultimately harmed the plaintiffs.

EFF filed an amicus brief in the case, Force v. Facebook, arguing that both Section 230 and the First Amendment prevent lawsuits under the Anti-Terrorism Act that seek to hold online platforms liable for content posted by their users—even if some of those users are pro-terrorism or terrorists themselves. We’ve been concerned that without definitive rulings that these types of cases cannot stand under existing law, they would continue to threaten the availability of open online forums and Internet users’ ability to access information.

The Second Circuit’s decision is in contrast to that of the Ninth Circuit in Fields v. Twitter and the Sixth Circuit in Crosby v. Twitter, where both courts held only that the plaintiffs in those cases—victims of an ISIS attack in Jordan and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, respectively—could not show a sufficient causal link between the social media companies and the harm suffered by the plaintiffs. Thus, the Ninth and Sixth Circuit rulings are concerning because they tacitly suggest that better pleaded complaints against social media companies for hosting pro-terrorism content might survive judicial scrutiny in the future.

The facts underlying all of these cases are tragic and we have the utmost sympathy for the plight of the victims and their families. The law appropriately allows victims to seek compensation from the perpetrators of terrorism themselves. But holding online platforms liable for what terrorists and their supporters post online—and the violence they ultimately perpetrate—would have dire repercussions: if online platforms no longer have Section 230 immunity in this context, those forums and services will take aggressive action to screen their users, review and censor content, and potentially prohibit anonymous speech. The end result would be sanitized online platforms that would not permit discussion and research about terrorism, a prominent and vexing political and social issue. As we have chronicled, existing efforts by companies to filter extremist online speech have exacted collateral damage by silencing human rights defenders.

There have been several cases filed in federal courts that seek to hold social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube civilly liable for providing material support to terrorists or aiding and abetting terrorists by allowing terrorist content on their platforms. We hope that the Second Circuit’s ruling will inspire other courts to ensure through their rulings that all Internet users will continue to be able to discuss and access information about controversial topics.

These 7 Prominent Conservatives Have Nothing in Common With White Supremacists, Nothing at All

Please don't tie Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Laura Ingraham, John Cornyn, Candace Owens, Stephen Miller, or Donald Trump to white supremacy.

The post These 7 Prominent Conservatives Have Nothing in Common With White Supremacists, Nothing at All appeared first on The Intercept.

At some point I'll have to ask for my money back...

Researchers discover new security flaw in all modern Intel processors:

https://thenextweb.com/security/2019/08/06/researchers-discover-troubling-new-security-flaw-in-all-modern-intel-processors/

Purism CTO, Nicole Faerber, nominated for “CTO of the Year” by Women in IT Awards.

https://puri.sm/posts/nicole-faerber-nominated-for-cto-of-the-year-by-women-in-it-awards/

Opening the Door for Censorship: New Trademark Enforcement Mechanisms Added for Top-Level Domains

With so much dissatisfaction over how companies like Facebook and YouTube moderate user speech, you might think that the groups that run the Internet’s infrastructure would want to stay far away from the speech-policing business. Sadly, two groups that control an important piece of the Internet’s infrastructure have decided to jump right in. 

The organization that governs the .org top-level domain, known as Public Interest Registry (PIR), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) are expanding their role as speech regulators through a new agreement, negotiated behind closed doors. And they’re doing it despite the nearly unanimous opposition of nonprofit and civil society groups—the people who use .org domains. EFF is asking ICANN’s board to reconsider.

ICANN makes policies for resolving disputes over domain names, which are enforced through a web of contracts. Best-known is the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which allows trademark holders to challenge bad-faith use of their trademarks in a domain name (specifically, cybersquatting or trademark infringement). UDRP offers a cheaper, faster alternative to domain name disputes than court. When ICANN began to add many new top-level domains beyond the traditional ones (.com, .net, .org, and a few others), major commercial brands and their trademark attorneys predicted a plague of bad-faith registrations and threatened to hold up creation of these new top-level domains, including much-needed domains in non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Arabic, and Cyrillic.

In response, the community allowed trademark interests to create more enforcement mechanisms, but solely for these new top-level domains. One of these was Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS), a faster, cheaper version of UDRP. URS is a summary procedure designed for slam-dunk cases of cybersquatting or trademark infringement. it features shorter deadlines for responding to challenges, and its decisionmakers are paid much less than the panelists who decide UDRP cases.

In a move that has drawn lots of criticism, ICANN announced that it is requiring the use of URS in the .org domain, along with other rules that were developed specifically for the newer domains.

URS is a bad fit for .org, the third most-used domain and home to millions of nonprofit organizations (including, of course, eff.org). The .org domain has been around since 1985, long before ICANN was created. And with over ten million names already registered, there’s no reason to expect a “land rush” of people snatching up the names of popular brands and holding them for ransom.

When nonprofit organizations use brand names and other commercial trademarks, it’s often to call out corporations for their misdeeds—a classic First Amendment-protected activity. That means challenges to domain names in .org need more careful, thorough consideration than URS can provide. Adding URS to the .org domain puts nonprofit organizations who strive to hold powerful corporations and governments accountable at risk of losing their domain names, effectively removing those organizations from the Internet until they can register a new name and teach the public how to find it. Losing a domain name means losing search engine placement, breaking every inbound link to the website, and knocking email and other vital services offline.

Beyond URS, the new .org agreement gives Public Interest Registry carte blanche to “implement additional protections of the legal rights of third parties” whenever it chooses to. These aren’t necessarily limited to cases where a court has found a violation of law and orders a domain name suspended. And it could reach beyond disputes over domain names to include challenges to the content of a website, effectively making PIR a censorship bureau.

This form of content regulation has already happened in some TLDs. Donuts and Radix, which operate hundreds of top-level domains, already suspend websites’ domain names based on accusations of copyright infringement from the Motion Picture Association of America, without a court order. Some registries also take down the domain names of pharmacy-related websites based on requests from private groups affiliated with U.S. pharmaceutical companies, again without a court order or due process.

PIR, the operator of .org, has previously proposed to build its own copyright enforcement system. PIR quickly walked back that proposal after EFF spotlighted it. But PIR’s new agreement with ICANN provides a legal foundation for bringing back that proposal, or other forms of content regulation. And the existence of these contract terms could make it harder for PIR and registrars to say “No” the next time an industry group like MPAA, or a law enforcement agency from anywhere in the world, comes demanding that they act as judge, jury, and executioner of “bad” websites.

Bypassing Users’ Input

The process that led to these changes was problematic, too. The multistakeholder process, which is supposed to account for the views and needs of all groups affected by a policy change, was simply bypassed. ICANN did announce the new .org contract and provided for a period of public comment. But this seems to have been a hollow gesture.

The Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group, a group that represents many hundreds of the organizations that have .org domain names, filed a comment laying out why that domain shouldn’t have the URS system and other “rights protection mechanisms” beyond the UDRP. EFF and the Domain Name Rights Coalition also filed a comment, which was joined by top academics and activists on domain name policy.

An extraordinary and unprecedented 3,250 others filed comments opposing the new .org contract, mainly on the grounds that it removed price caps from .org registrations, potentially allowing Public Interest Registry to increase the fees it charges millions of nonprofit organizations. In contrast, only six commenters, including groups representing trademark holder interests and incumbent registries, filed supportive comments. But ICANN made no meaningful changes in response to these comments from the actual users of .org domain names. The contract they concluded on July 30th was the same as the one they proposed at the start of the public comment period. The ICANN Staff seem to think they can make any policies they choose by contract.

What Comes Next?

EFF has asked the ICANN board to reconsider their new contract, to submit the issue to the ICANN community for a decision, and to remove URS from the .org domain. Public Interest Registry has not yet created any new enforcement mechanisms, nor returned to the copyright enforcement proposal it made and shelved in 2016—but if the new contract stands, it will give them legal cover for doing so. It’s important that Internet users, especially nonprofits, make clear to ICANN, PIR, and PIR’s parent organization, the Internet Society, that nonprofits don’t need new, accelerated trademark enforcement or new forms of content regulation. After all, there’s no reason to think that these organizations will regulate the speech of Internet users any better than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other prominent social networks have done. It would be best if they stay out of that role entirely.

The Case for Enthusiasm Over “Electability”—Or, Why We Don’t Need Another John Kerry.

A disastrous Republican administration in the White House. A varied field of Democratic candidates, ranging from a Vermont progressive who opposed the Iraq War to a more moderate frontrunner who voted to authorize it. A mobilized progressive base torn between the desire for ambitious policies and the need to win the general election.

We speak, of course, of 2004, and the Democratic campaign to unseat President George W. Bush. Writing in the magazine after Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) won the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, In These Times’ David Moberg argued that “intense assaults” on the electability of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, then running as a progressive, helped pave the way for Kerry’s success: 

[Voters'] desire to be with a winner certainly helps Kerry, especially since at least one Newsweek poll just before the New Hampshire primary showed him beating Bush by a small margin. Primary voters this year have often sounded more like professional campaign strategists than citizens picking leaders who champion their issues. In that way the Democratic primary resembles economist John Maynard Keynes’ description of stock markets. Rather than picking a company based on its intrinsic merits, Keynes argued, the successful stock-picker guesses which stock is most likely to be picked by other people. In the primary, voters are partly deciding not on the basis of which candidate they like but on whom they believe a majority of Americans will like next November. 

Moberg himself was disinclined to take this sort of risk, warning that “supporting a candidate because he is ‘electable’ is a coolly calculated and ephemeral political commitment. Any passion for Kerry, for example, seems to come less for the man himself than that he represents a vehicle to defeat Bush.” This lack of passion, Moberg argued, could hinder Kerry’s chances: 

Electability arguments too often are framed defensively—how a particular Democratic candidate can withstand divisive Republican appeals on religion and conservative values, military toughness, gun ownership and cutting taxes. But the best defense may be a strong offense. Candidates on the offensive have a chance of defining the debate—as Dean did on the war and … in appealing to class interests that bring together black and white voters. Democrats can also be proactive by attacking corporate abuses of power. … [Many] New Hampshire voters said they backed the candidate who most stands up for what he believes in—and Dean won their support over Kerry by more than a 2-to-1 margin. But Kerry overwhelmingly won [the] vote when it came to electability. One-fifth of voters said they backed the candidate who could best defeat George Bush—a margin Kerry won almost 6-to-1 over Dean. With electability looming so large, the odds favor victory by the candidate who best can stand up to Bush. Although Kerry was on a roll, many Democrats still did not have a clear idea of what he stands for—and his early victories do not prove he is that candidate.

On the note of fake followers, before I blocked gab.com on our https://m.abunchtell.com instance I noticed very bot-like behavior from seemingly real accounts on that instance -- very reminiscent of birdsite bots.

Definitely worth thinking about how we guard against misinformation and astroturfing in the #fediverse as this gets more prevalent. Domain blocks alone probably won't be enough -- the classic social media features we include or leave out matter, too.

There is no evil like reCAPTCHA at https://thestoic.me/there-is-no-evil-like-recaptcha - discuss at https://freepo.st/freepost.cgi/post/oyjgjbi3yw #freepost

Subhumans release “Thought Is Free” ahead of new album

Veteran UK anarcho-punks Subhumans release their first album in over ten years, Crisis Point, next month via Pirates Press Records. The first track from the album has surfaced. Have a listen to “Thought Is Free” below. The band are to embark on an East Coast tour in September.

The post Subhumans release “Thought Is Free” ahead of new album appeared first on Dying Scene.

Grade 2 sign to Hellcat to release LP

Isle of Wight, UK street punk trio Grade 2 have signed to Hellcat. The band are to release their third album, Graveyard Island, via the label on October 11th. The album was produced by Tim Armstrong himself. To mark the announcement, a video for the title track from the album has been released. Have a […]

The post Grade 2 sign to Hellcat to release LP appeared first on Dying Scene.

Scientists can now manipulate brain cells using smartphone

A team of scientists have invented a device that can control neural circuits using a tiny brain implant controlled by a smartphone. The device could speed up efforts to uncover brain diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, addiction, depression, and pain.

The Bad-Apple Myth of Policing https://prismo.xyz/posts/93f7ad8e-0fd3-4a54-a614-5d8c7cc782a3

Joe Biden Didn’t Just Vote for the Iraq Invasion—He Helped Lead the March to War

AS THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S SABER-RATTLING TOWARD IRAN THREATENS ANOTHER DISASTROUS WAR in the Middle East, foreign policy has gained newfound focus in the 2020 presidential race. And former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq War leaves him with a particularly glaring vulnerability.

Biden’s vote had already become a sticking point in the race before President Trump began his provocations toward Iran in earnest. Bernie Sanders has used Biden’s record to draw a contrast with his own opposition to the Iraq War. Rep. Seth Moulton, another 2020 candidate, has called for Biden to admit he was wrong for casting the vote. And a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll showed more than 40 percent of respondents between 18 and 29 were less likely to back Biden because of it.

But to say the now-Democratic frontrunner voted for the Iraq War doesn't fully describe his role in what has come to be widely acknowledged as the most disastrous foreign policy decision of the 21st century. A review of the historical record shows Biden didn't just vote for the war—he was a leading Democratic voice in its favor, and played an important role in persuading the public of its necessity and, more broadly, laying the groundwork for Bush's invasion.

In the wake of September 11th, Biden stood as a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy, chairing the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As President Bush attempted to sell the U.S. public on the war, Biden became one of the administration’s steadfast allies in this cause, backing claims about the supposed threat posed by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and insisting on the necessity of removing him from power.

Biden did attempt to placate Democrats by criticizing Bush on procedural grounds while largely affirming his case for war, even as he painted himself as an opponent of Bush and the war in front of liberal audiences. In the months leading up to and following the invasion, Biden would make repeated, contradictory statements about his position on the issue, eventually casting himself as an unrepentant backer of the war effort just as the public and his own party began to sour on it.

FROM DOVE TO HAWK

Biden hadn't always been a hawk on Iraq. He had voted against the first Gulf War in 1991, though even his opposition to that war had been tepid at best, focused mainly on badgering George H.W. Bush into having Congress rubber stamp a war Bush had already made clear he was intent on waging with or without its approval.

In 1996 Biden criticized Republican claims that then-President Bill Clinton wasn’t being tough enough on Iraq amid calls to remove Saddam Hussein from power, labeling an ouster “not a doable policy.” Before the War on Terror drove U.S. foreign policy, Biden criticized Bush during his first year in office for the then-president’s hawkish position on missile defense.

September 11th changed all this. Only one day before the attacks, at a speech in front of the National Press Club, Biden had called Bush’s foreign policy ideas “absolute lunacy” and charged that his missile defense system proposal would “begin a news arms race.” But the  nearly 3,000 Americans who were killed on U.S. soil that day upended the political consensus. Bush’s approval rating shot up to a historic 90 percent, and any elected officials who failed to match the president’s zeal for military retribution became vulnerable to accusations of being “soft on terror.”

“Count me in the 90 percent,” Biden said in the weeks after the attack. There was “total cohesion,” he said, between Democrats and Republicans in the challenges ahead. “There is no daylight between us.”

In November 2002, just a little over a year following the World Trade Center attacks, Biden faced re-election amidst a political climate in which the Bush administration had incited nationalist sentiment over the issue of terrorism. In October 2001, Biden had been criticized in Delaware newspapers for comments that were perceived as potentially weak, warning that the United States could be seen as a “high-tech bully” if it failed to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan and instead relied on a protracted bombing campaign to oust the Taliban.

Consequently, Biden, then deemed by the New Republic as the Democratic Party’s “de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism,” quickly became a close ally of the Bush administration in its prosecution of that war. The White House installed a special secure phone line to Biden’s home, and he and three other members of Congress met privately with Bush in October 2001 to come up with a positive public relations message for the war in Afghanistan.

Biden’s stance on Iraq soon began to change, too. In November 2001, Biden had batted away suggestions of regime change, saying the United States should defeat al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden before thinking about other targets. By February 2002, he appeared to have creaked opened the door to the possibility of an invasion.

“If Saddam Hussein is still there five years from now, we are in big trouble,” he told a crowd of 400 Delaware National Guard officers that month at the annual Officers Call event.

“It would be unrealistic, if not downright foolish, to believe we can claim victory in the war on terrorism if Saddam is still in power,” he said around the same time, echoing the language of hawks like Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Biden soon developed the position he would hold for the following 13 months leading into Bush’s March 2003 invasion of Iraq: While the Bush administration was entirely justified in its plans to remove Hussein from power in Iraq, it had to do a better job of selling the inevitable war to the U.S. public and the international community.

“There is overwhelming support for the proposition that Saddam Hussein should be removed from power,” he said in March 2002, while noting that divisions remained about how exactly that would be done. If the administration wanted his support, Biden continued, they would have to make “a complete and thorough case” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and to outline what they envisioned a post-Hussein Iraq would look like.

It was a stance well-calibrated for the political climate. Biden could continue to point to disagreements with the administration for liberal audiences, even if they were merely procedural, while putting his weight behind the ultimate goal of war with Iraq. At the same time, Biden’s apparent criticisms doubled as advice for the administration: If you want buy-in from liberals for your war, this is what you’ll have to do.

“I don't know a single informed person who is suggesting you can take down Saddam and not be prepared to stay for two, four, five years to give the country a chance to be held together,” Biden recounted telling Bush privately in June 2002. It was a talking point he would repeat often over the next year, that regime change in Iraq was the correct thing to do, but would require a long-term commitment from the United States after Hussein’s removal.

SETTING THE GROUND RULES

During frequent television appearances, Biden didn’t just insist on the necessity of removing Hussein from power, but appeared to signal to the Bush administration on what grounds it could safely seek military action against Iraq.

When Bush’s directive to the CIA to step up support for Iraqi opposition groups and even possibly capture and kill Hussein was leaked to the Washington Post in June, Biden gave it his approval. Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if the plan gave him any pause, Biden replied: “Only if it doesn't work.”

"If the covert action doesn't work, we'd better be prepared to move forward with another action, an overt action, and it seems to me that we can't afford to miss," he added.

“Prominent Democrats endorse administration plan to remove Iraqi leader from power,” ran the subsequent Associated Press headline.

A month later in July, Biden affirmed that Congress would back Bush in a pre-emptive strike on Iraq in the event of a “clear and present danger” and if “the president can make the case that we’re about to be attacked.”

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” the same month if a discovery that Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda would justify an invasion, Biden replied: “If he can prove that, yes, he would have the authority in my view.”

“And this will be the first time ever in the history of the United States of America that we have essentially invaded another country preemptively to take out a leadership, I think justifiably given the case being made.”

These themes would be used by the Bush administration in the months ahead to sell the war to the American public. The non-existent ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda became one of the most high-profile talking points for the war’s proponents. And the Bush administration would publicize the supposedly imminent threat Hussein posed to the United States, including then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s infamous September declaration that “we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

By July Biden appeared to rule out a diplomatic solution to the conflict. “Dialogue with Saddam is useless,” he said.

 

NOT A SKEPTIC TO BE HEARD

It was also in July 2002 that Biden carried out one of his most consequential actions in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when he held several days of congressional hearings about the then-potential invasion.

Biden stressed the hearings weren’t meant to antagonize the White House. Rather, as he explained, they would inform the American people about the stakes of the conflict and the logistical issues involved in waging it.

At the time, the pro-war stance shared between the administration, much of the press, and Democrats like Biden was by no means unanimous. Many of the United States’ closest allies in Europe (apart from Tony Blair’s British government) were wary of the war drums beating from Washington, as were many Arab states. In July, King Abdullah II of Jordan, a U.S. ally in the Middle East, called the idea of an invasion “somewhat ludicrous.”

The same month, the Houston Chronicle reported, based on interviews with anonymous officials, that a number of senior military officials, including members of the joint chiefs of staff, were in disagreement with the White House’s drive for war with Iraq, and believed that Hussein posed no immediate threat to the United States. The day before the hearings, Scott Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector at the UN, cautioned that it was far from “inevitable” that Iraq had restarted its weapons program, and warned that “Biden's open embrace of regime removal in Baghdad” threatened to make the hearings “devolve into a political cover” for Congress to authorize Bush’s war.

Yet as Stephen Zunes reported for The Progressive in April 2019, none of these views were aired at Biden’s hearings, which opened with Biden stating that WMDs “must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power,” and that “if we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late.” Ritter himself was never invited to testify.

Neither were other experts critical of the Bush narrative on Iraq, including Rolf Ekéus, the former executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission, the inspection regime set up after the Gulf War to deal with WMDs, and former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck, who complained that he was “very agitated by the deliberate distortions and misrepresentations” that made it “look to the average person in the U.S. as if Iraq is a threat to their security.” According to Biden, Bush later thanked him for the hearings.

By Zunes’ count, none of the 18 witnesses who were called objected to the idea that Hussein had WMDs, and all three witnesses who testified on the subject of al-Qaeda claimed the organization received direct support from Iraq—the very red line Biden had said would give Bush the authority to invade the country. Out of the 12 witnesses who discussed an invasion, half were in favor and only two opposed. Biden himself said throughout the hearings that Iraq was a national security threat.

It was largely up to Republicans on the committee—namely Lincoln Chafee and Chuck Hagel—to voice skepticism about a war effort. Ritter accused Biden and other members of congress of having “preordained a conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts.” Indeed, on the day of the hearings, Biden had co-authored a New York Times op-ed suggesting that continued “containment” of Hussein “raises the risk that Mr. Hussein will play cat-and-mouse with inspectors while building more weapons,” and that “if we wait for the danger to become clear and present, it may be too late.”

Having given a platform to pro-war talking points, Biden then hit the talk show circuit to cite the lopsided testimony he himself had arranged in order to argue for war. Determining Hussein’s intentions was “like reading the entrails of goats,” Biden told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and what mattered more was Hussein’s ability to use WMDs, whatever those intentions might be. He pointed to testimony in the July hearings to argue it was clear that Iraq had such weapons.

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat,” he said. “This is a guy who’s an extreme danger to the world.”

While the mainstream press featured few skeptical and anti-war voices at the time, a number of them assailed Biden for going along with the Bush administration.

“Biden apparently believes that he fulfills the constitutional function of advise and consent by merely being the cheerleader for the administration's rising chorus demanding war with Iraq,” wrote Stanley Kutler in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “When and how are the only questions in his repertoire.”

 

“A COURSE OF MODERATION AND DELIBERATION”

By fall 2002, Bush appeared to have heeded Biden’s frequent exhortations for how to sell the war.

On September 12, almost a year to the day of the terrorist attacks that had sparked the march to war, Bush went before the UN to make a case for an invasion directly to the international community. Biden praised him for doing “a very good job” in making that case with a “brilliant” speech, and again stressed that “this is the world’s fight,” though cautioning that “the worst option is going it alone, but it is an option.”

That September, Bush also finally asked Congress for a war authorization. While the president backed an expansive resolution in the House, Biden and fellow Foreign Relations Committee member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) put forward their own rival resolution in the Senate that scaled back some of the House version’s more alarming language and stressed the themes Biden had been articulating for the better part of a year. The Senate resolution limited the use of force to Iraq, made dismantling WMDs the primary justification for war, and stressed the importance of international support (though reserving the right to act unilaterally if the UN Security Council moved too slowly).

“We are trying to give the president the power that he needs and get a large vote,” Biden explained.

Bush quickly routed Biden by making a compromise with Democratic House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt that swung momentum behind the House resolution. Deciding it was too late, and that there was no way of stopping its passage, Biden simply resigned himself to the compromise House resolution.

“In this place, everybody's pretty practical at the end of the day,” he said.

Bush ultimately won over Biden by incorporating several of his suggestions into the final resolution and a speech he gave on October 7, 2002, in which he painted Iraq as a “grave threat to peace” creating an “arsenal of terror.” He had “made a compelling case,” said Biden, who was “very pleased with his rationale that he laid out.”

While Biden reportedly wavered at the last moment on his promise to cast his vote, he ultimately fell in line, arguing the resolution would “give the president the kind of momentum he needs” to get Security Council backing. On October 11, Biden was one of 77 senators who voted to give Bush the authorization to wage war on Iraq, joining fellow Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein. Twenty-one Democratic senators, including Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden and Patrick Leahy, voted against it.

“At each pivotal moment, [President Bush] has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation,” Biden said on the Senate floor. “I believe he will continue to do so … the president has made it clear that war is neither imminent nor inevitable.”

A month later, Biden sailed to a sixth term to the Senate with 58 percent of the vote.

“POWERFUL AND IRREFUTABLE”

Biden wasn’t as eager to tout his leading role in the lead-up to the Iraq War in front of all audiences.

On November 11, 2002, Biden gave a speech at a meeting of the Trotter Group, an organization of African-American columnists. Perhaps owing to strong black opposition to the war, including the NAACP board’s October 28, 2002, adoption of a resolution opposing the invasion, Biden sounded very different notes in front of the audience. He denied there was a direct link between Hussein and al-Qaeda (“I don’t consider the war on Iraq the war on terror”) and struck a less hawkish note (“My hope is that we don’t need to go into Iraq”).

After chairing hearings filled with pro-war testimony, Biden told the Trotter Group crowd that “the guys who have to fight this war don't think it's a good idea,” and that doing so would be “the dumbest thing in the world.” Discussing the war authorization he had voted for, he claimed that Republicans had taken “something that nobody, including the president, believes is an imminent danger and moved it up in the election cycle,” and that he reluctantly supported the final resolution in order to give then-Secretary of State Colin Powell leverage to get a resolution out of the UN that would slow the administration’s march to war.

Yet even as he painted himself as a war opponent, Biden’s role in making the war happen wasn’t finished.

In December 2002, Biden embarked on a trip to Germany and the Middle East with Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to cobble together a coalition for the impending war. He first flew to Germany to meet with an Iraqi resistance leader, then headed to Jordan to meet with its monarch, before stopping in Israel and Qatar. The Delaware Republican Party sent him its best wishes.

“We wish the senator good luck and hope he continues to support the president on foreign-policy matters,” its chairman said.

At one point, Biden spoke to the Kurd Parliament in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, carved out in the wake of the first Gulf War. Biden made clear to the Kurds, longtime opponents of Hussein’s regime, that the United States had their back.

“We will stand with you in your effort to build a united Iraq,” he told them, adding that “the mountains are not your only friends,” playing off a local saying.

As Colin Powell prepared to present supposed evidence of Iraq’s WMD program to the UN in February—a factually flawed address that Powell two years later would call a “blot” on his record—Biden hyped the presentation to the press, saying the administration “has evidence now that can change people's minds.”

“I know there's enough circumstantial evidence that if this were a jury trial, I could convict you,” he said. After Powell’s address, Biden called his case “very powerful and I think irrefutable,” and told him, “I am proud to be associated with you.”

At the same time, Biden spent much of the rest of the month leading up to invasion painting himself as its opponent. He criticized Bush for everything but the actual decision to remove Hussein: for failing to make a sufficiently strong case to the public, for not securing more international buy-in for the invasion, for keeping Congress out of the loop and for grossly lackluster planning for postwar Iraq.

“As every hour goes by, I think the chance of war is increasing,” he said in early March, five months after voting to give Bush the power to invade Iraq. “I was hoping it wasn't, hoping there was a shot at doing this peacefully, but that looks slimmer and slimmer.”

Yet even after Bush failed to secure the international cooperation Biden had spent months insisting was necessary, the lack of support wasn’t enough to convince Biden to abandon his support. As Bush issued an ultimatum to Hussein on March 17—leave or be invaded—Biden was behind him.

“I support the president,” he said after meeting with Bush and other officials before the ultimatum. “Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. ... I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.”

Biden portrayed himself as someone who had been powerless to stop the conflict.

“A lot of Americans, myself included, are really concerned about how we got to this stage and about all the lost opportunities for diplomacy,” he said. “But we are where we are. ... Let loose the dogs of war. I'm confident we will win.” He and the rest of the Democrats voted to pass a Senate resolution 99-0 supporting Bush and commending the troops.

Months after the war was launched and Hussein was deposed, any reservations Biden claimed to have had about the war appeared to melt away.

“I, for one, thought we should have gone in Iraq,” he told CNN in June 2003, while noting that not all Democrats had been as enthusiastic about invading the country.

With the much-ballyhooed WMDs failing to materialize, Biden cast himself as a skeptic about the administration’s claims about their existence.

“I also said at the time, as far back as August, that I thought the administration was exaggerating the threat of weapons of mass destruction,” he told CNN.

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” later that month, he told host Tony Snow that he had never believed the Bush administration’s rhetoric on the issue, and that it had erred in exaggerating the threat, as there was sufficient grounds to invade Iraq based on the weapons it was reported to have in 1998.

“So you think, looking back on it, still, that it was a just war, in your opinion?” asked Snow.

“Oh, I do think it was a just war,” said Biden.

After playing a clip of then-presidential candidate Howard Dean boasting of his opposition to the war even at the height of its popularity, Snow asked Biden if Dean’s position should be the consensus view of the Democratic Party.

 “No,” Biden flatly replied.

Even as the war effort rapidly went awry in the months that followed, with U.S. soldier deaths continuing to climb after major combat operations were declared over on May 1 and terrorist attacks becoming a regular feature of Iraqi life, Biden continued to insist that war had been the right course of action.

“I voted to go into Iraq, and I'd vote to do it again,” he said at a July 2003 hearing.           

As growing numbers of Democrats, and even members of the general public, turned against the war, Biden rebuked them, implicitly and explicitly.

“In my view, anyone who can't acknowledge that the world is better off without [Hussein] is out of touch,” he said two days later.

“Contrary to what some in my party might think, Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with sooner rather than later,” he insisted.

An increasingly lonely voice in a party that would soon make common cause with the growing anti-war movement, Biden continued to back Bush.

“The president made [the case against Saddam] well,” he concluded on July 31. “I commend the president.”

NO REGRETS

In the eyes of the public, a vote for the resolution that gave Bush the authority to wage war on Iraq is enough to cast serious doubt on a candidate’s judgment, as Hillary Clinton learned in 2016. But the fact is, Joe Biden did a lot more than cast a vote.

As an experienced and respected voice on foreign policy, a powerful Democrat, and someone widely perceived as a dove due to his opposition to the Vietnam war, Biden’s backing of regime change in Iraq was crucial to Bush’s effort of selling the public on the war. Biden’s insistence that Hussein posed a serious threat to the United States, possessed WMDs and needed to be removed from power helped create momentum for the rising pro-war campaign. And as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, rather than question the prominent voices of doubt, including senior members of the U.S. military, Biden stacked his Iraq hearings with voices in agreement with Bush’s fallacious case for war.

Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness—including her vote for the Iraq war—was one of several factors that likely contributed to her 2016 loss to Donald Trump in key traditional Democratic states. But beyond arguments about electability, the next president will inherit a volatile world on the brink of several different conflicts, including a possible showdown with Iran. When voters chose the next Democratic nominee, they’ll have to decide whether someone who helped lead the march to war in Iraq is really the best person to take on Trump—and guide U.S. foreign policy as president. 

This investigation was supported by the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting.