Progressive Political News

Every Fourth of July, Erwin Knoll, the late editor of The Progressive magazine, would host a party. He’d grill burgers and brats and tack copies of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights to trees in his backyard in Madison, Wisconsin.

The U.S. government has never had a fiercer critic than Knoll. And yet, having come to New York City as a child after fleeing Nazis in his native Austria in 1939, he cherished these foundational documents of American democracy, even though his adopted nation has always fallen short of its lofty ideals.

I think about Knoll’s July Fourth celebrations, some of which I had the good fortune to attend, as I contemplate what it means to celebrate the nation’s 249th birthday during a period that will deservedly be remembered as one of the most shameful in U.S. history. 

Hard-working immigrants arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in workplaces, courthouses, churches, and schools. Farm workers chased in the fields. Foreign students scooped off the street and thrown into detention facilities for engaging in constitutionally protected speech.

President Donald Trump said he would be going after murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals. But immigrants are in fact far less likely to fall into this category than those born in the United States, and so the dragnet has been drawn around everyone who lacks legal status (and even some U.S. citizens). Of the more than 200,000 people booked into ICE detention facilities between last October 1 and mid-June, 93 percent were never convicted of a violent crime, and 65 percent had no criminal history whatsoever.

Consider the case of Narciso Barranco, a landscaper in Santa Ana, California. On Saturday, June 21, while doing some landscaping work outside of an IHOP, he was accosted by a group of heavily armed and masked federal immigration agents. They chased and pepper-sprayed him, threw him to the ground and punched him in the head repeatedly as he cried out in pain.

Videos of Barranco’s mistreatment have been seen around the world. The Department of Homeland Security claims he attacked agents with his weed whacker, which the available evidence does not substantiate.

Barranco, forty-eight years old, originally from Mexico, has been living, working, and paying taxes in the United States since the 1990s. His three sons are all U.S. Marines, including two on active duty. He was in the process of applying for what’s known as parole in place, which permits family members of active-duty military to stay in the United States on an annually renewable basis.

“I feel betrayed,” said Alejandro Barranco, Narciso’s oldest son, to NBC News. “My dad has no criminal history. He wasn’t doing anything bad. He was just working. The way they attacked him, I don’t think it’s right.” Alejandro, a former Marine who served in Afghanistan, noted that his father’s first concern when they spoke was to make sure the IHOP manager knew Alejandro would be taking over and the job would get done.

“It doesn’t make me love my country less,” Alejandro told MSNBC. “It makes me love it more because I see all these people standing up for my dad, and it’s just [what] this country is all about, you know, coming together as a community, loving each other and helping each other out so that this country can look the best, whether it’s landscape or just people in general.” As of this writing, Narciso Barranco remains in custody at an ICE facility in Los Angeles.

One day, after we have gagged on the bitter fruit of expelling essential workers who were doing jobs most Americans don’t want—cleaning hotel rooms, working in meat processing plants, taking care of the sick and elderly—we will look back on this chapter of our history with collective regret. Already, millions of Americans have signaled their rejection of Trump’s policies, taking to the streets all across the nation. Millions more will join them as the abject cruelty and unmitigated folly of his administration’s agenda becomes even more apparent.

So this Fourth of July, fire up that grill, post those copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and commit to bringing an end to this horror show as soon as possible.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

On June 12—less than twenty-four hours before Israel launched the airstrikes on Iran that escalated into a twelve-day war between the two countries—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors voted by a slim majority to find Iran in non-compliance with its IAEA obligations based on the findings of a damning report by the organization’s director general, Rafael Grossi. The resolution followed an investigation stemming from 2018 Israeli intelligence reports, based on a trove of alleged Iranian documents, which identified three previously undisclosed sites where Iran had conducted uranium enrichment prior to 2003. 

In 2015, before the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement took effect, the IAEA was satisfied that Iran had accounted for its past nuclear activities. But in 2019, Grossi opened an investigation into the new Israeli allegations, and the IAEA eventually gained access to the sites, where they found traces of enriched uranium. Iranian officials have suggested that the uranium traces may have been placed in the three sites by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency or its Iranian collaborators, such as the rebel group Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). And even as the resolution has provided diplomatic cover for a war, Grossi has yet to explain publicly how he or the IAEA can be certain that Iran is in fact to blame for the enriched uranium traces. 

Grossi’s report also estimated a 50 percent increase in Iran’s stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium since February, which U.S. and Israeli politicians conflated with the IAEA resolution on Iran’s past activities to conjure up the unsubstantiated claim that Iran was on the verge of making a nuclear weapon in 2025. 

Behind the scenes, the United States took considerable action to ensure the passage of the resolution. Two days before the vote, the United States contacted eight board member governments to persuade them to either vote for the resolution or to not vote. Israeli officials said they saw the United States’ arm-twisting on behalf of the IAEA resolution as a significant signal of U.S. support for Israel’s war plans, which also reveals just how important it was to Israel to get the diplomatic cover afforded by the IAEA resolution 

What’s more, the June 12 board meeting coincided with the final day of President Donald Trump’s sixty-day ultimatum for the United States and Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement. Iran rejected a Trump Administration demand that it completely dismantle its domestic nuclear enrichment program, but a sixth round of negotiations was already scheduled for June 15th in Oman. However, as the IAEA board took its vote on June 12th, Israel was already loading weapons, fuel, and drop-tanks on its warplanes for the long flight to Iran and briefing its aircrews on their targets. The first Israeli air strikes hit Iran at 3:00 a.m. that night, and just over a week later, the United States also bombed Iran’s Fordo, Natanz and Esfahan civilian nuclear facilities. 

The IAEA was established in 1957 by the United Nations with the stated goal “to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies.” Since 1965, each of its 180 member countries have been subject to IAEA safeguards to ensure that civilian nuclear programs are “not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.”

But in its dealings with the nine countries that already have nuclear weapons, the IAEA can only try to contain the damage to its non-proliferation mission. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China have IAEA agreements allowing them to be safeguarded only on “voluntary offers” for “selected” non-military sites. India has a 2009 safeguard agreement requiring it to keep its military nuclear program separate from civilian nuclear projects like power plants and medical applications, while Pakistan has ten separate safeguard agreements for civilian nuclear projects only, such as one from 2017 to cover two Chinese-built power stations. North Korea withdrew from the IAEA in 1994, and from all safeguards in 2009. 

Israel, which began developing nuclear weapons in the 1950s, with substantial clandestine support from France, Britain, and Argentina, has only a limited 1975 safeguards agreement to cover a 1955 civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. An addendum in 1977 extended that safeguards agreement indefinitely, even though the work with the U.S. that it covered ended that year. This has allowed Israel to escape the scrutiny of IAEA safeguards just as effectively as North Korea, through a parody of compliance that the IAEA and the United States have played along with for half a century.

Though the IAEA and U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly maintained that Iran has not developed nuclear weapons, the country has been subject to politicized accusations that it is attempting to develop them since the 1980s. In 2002, President George W. Bush smeared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil” based on their alleged pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.” In response, then-IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei repeatedly assured the U.N. Security Council that the IAEA could find no evidence that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon—for which he and the IAEA were awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize after U.S. claims about Iraq’s weapons were found to be untrue.  ElBaradei also resisted U.S. pressure over Iran, and in 2007, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate agreed with the IAEA’s assessment that Iran had no nuclear weapons program, or had only had one before 2003. 

In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was created to impose oversight and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in return for the lifting of punitive economic sanctions, and the IAEA published its “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program.” The IAEA assessed that, while some of Iran’s past activities might have been relevant to nuclear weapons, they “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.” The IAEA “found no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”

But Israel has a long history of fabricating evidence to suggest that Iran is developing nuclear weapons in secret. Douglas Frantz, who wrote a report on Iran’s nuclear program for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, revealed that the Mossad created a special unit in 2003 to provide secret briefings on Iran’s nuclear program, using “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.” These efforts included a notorious 2004 incident in which the MEK provided the CIA with documents on a laptop that many believe were fabricated by the Mossad. But in spite of this history, Grossi chose to collaborate with Israel and investigate its latest allegations against Iran, conducting several years’ worth of meetings in Israel and negotiations and inspections in Iran. 

Grossi’s efforts led to  the resolution condemning Iran, which the IAEA Board of Governors voted on while Israel made its final war preparations, in full view of the satellites and intelligence agencies of the Western countries that drafted and voted for the resolution, to pave the way for yet another catastrophic war in the Middle East.

Grossi is not the first IAEA director to face a dilemma regarding U.S. and Israeli allegations about nuclear weapons programs in the Middle East, even as they both evade the IAEA safeguards system and maintain active nuclear weapons programs. In 2003, when the CIA produced a document purportedly showing that Iraq had secretly imported yellowcake uranium from Niger—just as Israel had done from Argentina while developing its own nuclear program in the 1960s— the IAEA determined within a few hours that the document was forged, and IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei immediately reported this to the U.N. Security Council. 

But Bush continued to publicly maintain the lie about Iraq importing yellowcake uranium from Niger, and other falsehoods about the country’s actions, and shortly after, the United States invaded Iraq, in a war based on lies and in flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter. Most of the world knew, however, that ElBaradei and the IAEA were right all along, and in 2005, the organization and its director were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for exposing Bush’s lies, speaking truth to power, and strengthening nuclear non-proliferation. 

Two years later, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate by all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies agreed with the IAEA’s finding that Iran, like Iraq, had no nuclear weapons program. ElBaradei faced a similar dilemma to the one that Grossi has faced, when, in 2008, Israel along with the U.S. and other Western governments launched a campaign to demand that he condemn Iran based on four documents found on the infamous laptop that appeared to show Iran conducting four distinct types of nuclear weapons research. 

Whereas Bush’s yellowcake document from Niger five years prior was clearly a forgery, the IAEA could not establish whether these four laptop documents were authentic or not. So ElBaradei refused to act on them or to make them public, despite considerable political pressure, because, as he later wrote in his book The Age of Deception, he knew the United States and Israel “wanted to create the impression that Iran presented an imminent threat, perhaps preparing the grounds for the use of force.” 

But after ElBaradei retired in 2009, decisions regarding the allegations against Iran were left to his successor, a Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano who became well known for his alignment with U.S. interests. After succeeding Amano as director general in 2019, Rafael Grossi not only continued enabling the IAEA’s subservience to U.S. and Western interests, but ensured that the IAEA played a critical role in Israel’s march to war on Iran, by reopening the IAEA’s investigation into Iran’s past activities at Israel’s request and then bringing that investigation to a head just in time to provide Israel and the U.S. the diplomatic cover they wanted for their war on Iran.

If Grossi had exercised the same level of caution and impartiality during his tenure as ElBaradei did, it is very possible that the United States and Israel would not have gone to war with Iran, and the U.S. and Iran could have reached a new diplomatic agreement. Like ElBaradei, Grossi might have been recognized as an IAEA Director General who fulfilled the IAEA’s mission and strengthened nuclear non-proliferation. Instead, as ElBaradei wrote in a tweet on June 17th, “To rely on force and not negotiations is a sure way to destroy the NPT and the nuclear non-proliferation regime (imperfect as it is), and sends a clear message to many countries that their “ultimate security” is to develop nuclear weapons!!!” 

Despite his subservience to U.S. and Western governments—or maybe because of it—Rafael Grossi has been touted as a Western-backed candidate to succeed Antonio Guterres as U.N. Secretary General in 2026. That would be a disaster for the world. Fortunately, there are many more qualified candidates to lead the world out of the crisis that he has helped the United States and Israel to create. As Grossi’s actions and their dire consequences have demonstrated, he is an unfit IAEA director whose continued presence in the role could drag the world closer to nuclear war—and he would be an unfit candidate for U.N. Secretary General as well.

One summer day in 2017, a front-page story in the StarNews of Wilmington, North Carolina, shook up the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The drinking water system, it said, was polluted with a contaminant commonly known as GenX, part of the family of “forever” PFAS chemicals. It came from a Chemours plant in…

“News media owners are much better off standing strong than acquiescing,” said Reporters Without Borders USA.