theintercept--2020-02-29--After 28 Years, the Fire That Sent Claude Garrett to Prison May Get a Second Look

the house at 114 Broadway Street and let out a deep sigh .
He stood still for a moment , then walked slowly toward the back of the house .
For a minute he said nothing , his footsteps echoing throughout the empty rooms .
The walls were painted bright colors — the living room was deep burgundy , the kitchen mustard yellow — but the space felt grim and cold .
Bayne entered the laundry room , a small , dirty space with white walls .
He placed his hand on his heart and grimaced .
This was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a fire almost 28 years earlier .
Bayne wore glasses , dark coveralls , and brown work boots .
It was a frigid Tuesday in December , the week before Christmas .
He ’ d driven to the house in Old Hickory , Tennessee , just north of Nashville , in a Jeep 4×4 advertising his business : The Fire PI : Confidential Origin and Cause Investigations .
The vehicle was filled with supplies — hard hats , flashlights , and a portable generator .
On the passenger ’ s seat was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Protection Association ’ s seminal handbook , “ NFPA 921 : Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigators.
” The first edition of “ NFPA 921 ” was published in 1992 , just weeks before the fire at 114 Broadway .
In the years to come , it would revolutionize Bayne ’ s profession .
Until that point , fire investigators had been taught to rely on instinct and their interpretation of visual evidence at the scene to determine a fire ’ s origin and cause .
But “ NFPA 921 ” replaced this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ evidence to test a hypothesis to figure out how a fire began .
Critically , the text also dispelled long-standing myths about fire behavior , debunking the visual clues that experts once associated with arson .
Irregular burn marks known as “ pour patterns , ” for example , long seen as evidence of a liquid accelerant , were actually produced by a phenomenon called flashover — the moment a fire in a room becomes a room on fire .
But these revelations came too late for the fire that killed Lance .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ February 24 , 1992 , they seized on a large “ pour pattern ” on the living room floor , along with a container of kerosene found in the kitchen .
Lance ’ s boyfriend , 35-year-old Claude Garrett , who survived the fire , insisted that he did not know how it started , explaining that the couple used kerosene to heat their home during the winter .
But he soon fell under suspicion .
Prosecutors said he locked Lance in the laundry room at the back of the house , poured @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and left her to die .
There should have been doubts about this theory from the start .
After being convicted of murder and sentenced to life in 1993 , Garrett won a new trial after uncovering evidence withheld by the state , which indicated that the door to the back room had not been locked at all .
But in 2003 , a new jury sent Garrett back to prison , much to the distress of Bayne , who was hired as an expert witness for the retrial .
He was convinced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — a conviction based on junk science that had long since been debunked .
For nearly 20 years Bayne has been trying to explain this to anyone who will listen .
Nevertheless , as we stood inside the house that day , Garrett was facing yet another Christmas behind bars .
I first met Bayne for an investigation into Garrett ’ s case published in 2015 .
After our initial meeting , he tried to visit the house but was turned away by a resident .
He ’ d been inside only once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a renter who gave him brief access — and was desperate to return .
Although Bayne had pored over the evidence in the case countless times , he wrote to me , “ a fire investigator needs to stand in the very spot ( a.k.a.
, the room of origin ) and revisit the event in his mind ’ s eye.
” The one-story cinderblock home remained standing after the fire , its basic structure intact .
Now the owner was preparing to sell it ; like many of the old houses in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it would likely be torn down .
Bayne had one last chance to look at the house up close , to consider what , if anything , it could tell him about the fire .
Although he can not prove it for sure , Bayne ’ s theory has always been that a burning cigarette started the fire .
Garrett and Lance were both smokers ; they had gone out drinking the night before , then returned and watched TV in the living room .
A loveseat had been fully consumed in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ point of origin .
Today , a qualified investigator would clear out the debris at the scene and then reconstruct the room as accurately as possible , returning surviving furnishings to their original locations in order to study how the fire progressed .
But this didn ’ t happen in 1992 : Investigators discarded the furniture onto the front lawn .
Bayne stepped into the living room and rattled off its former contents .
“ Loveseat .
Couch .
Fish tank .
Entertainment center.
” Then he turned right , into the bedroom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the fire , a scenario he had been replaying in his mind for years .
How Garrett awoke in the early morning hours , smelled smoke , saw a glow in the living room .
How he woke up Lance , ran with her toward the front door .
Bayne reached for my hand as he turned right from the bedroom and walked me toward the front door .
He opened it .
But , “ she turns , heads for the back .
He goes out the front only to realize @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” It all happened so fast , Bayne said .
With the front door open , oxygen fed the fire , devouring the living room ’ s cluttered contents , consuming the wood paneling on the walls .
It would have taken almost no time at all for the room to reach flashover .
By the time Lance got to the back room , “ this house was charged with smoke .
And in a few breaths , she ’ s collapsed.
” Inside the laundry room , Bayne shoved the back door @ @ @ @ @ @ @ entering from the backyard .
That door was not there in 1992 .
There was a boarded up window , instead .
Garrett has explained that he ’ d accidentally broken the window months before the fire , and the landlord would not fix it .
But prosecutors said Garrett had covered the window on purpose — all part of the plan to kill Lance .
Bayne did not believe this .
He believed in Garrett ’ s innocence .
He paused and sighed again .
“ If only there was a door.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ since the fire in Old Hickory .
For Garrett , now 63 , the anniversary comes at a particularly painful time .
His stepfather died suddenly last year , and in early February , his mother was admitted to the hospital for heart surgery , only to be told that she would likely only survive another six months .
In the meantime , exonerations in old arson crimes continue .
Last year , Robert Yell was exonerated in Kentucky after 15 years behind bars for a fire that killed his two children .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ as responding hysterically to the fire — and like Garrett , his clothes tested negative for any liquid accelerants .
Although Yell ’ s arson prosecution took place well after Garrett ’ s initial conviction , it rested on the same kind of junk science once used to charge people for arson .
Meanwhile , not a single U.S. state apart from Texas has undertaken a systematic review of old arson cases .
Nevertheless , there are some new reasons for optimism for Garrett .
A TV special reexamining the Old Hickory fire @ @ @ @ @ @ @ network Investigation Discovery , which promises to bring scrutiny to the case .
More importantly , an application to the Davidson County District Attorney General ’ s Conviction Review Unit , filed by Garrett ’ s attorneys last summer , is pending in Nashville .
Although the application guidelines dictate that the CRU will only examine cases in which appeals have been exhausted — something that has not yet happened in Garrett ’ s case — the office seems open to revisiting the case .
There has also been a series of important @ @ @ @ @ @ @ challenged his conviction in state court based in part on new reports by leading fire experts who concluded that there was no reliable evidence of arson in his case .
One affidavit , by renowned fire scientist John Lentini , further debunked the so-called pour patterns as proof that kerosene had been used to start the fire .
A 2013 study revealed that ignitable liquids burn up quickly in fires , Lentini wrote , “ and do not cause the kind of charring found on the floor of the Garrett residence.
” The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but last fall , the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Tennessee — a chance to litigate claims that have not received a hearing in court .
Finally , in December 2019 , a federal district court authorized evidence-gathering on a nagging question : whether lead investigator James F. Cooper , a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol , Tobacco , Firearms , and Explosives and the state ’ s star witness against Garrett , misrepresented his credentials on the stand .
At the 1993 and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was certified with the International Association of Arson Investigators .
But in a March 2019 letter to Garrett ’ s new appellate attorney , the organization showed certification only from 2007 to 2012 .
If Cooper misled the court about his qualifications , it could be grounds for a new trial .
It may well be that Cooper was , in fact , certified at the time of the trials — and that the issue lies with the IAAI ’ s record-keeping .
But even if he did not commit perjury on this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s testimony any less flawed .
When it comes to his analysis of the fire , the central question is not whether his official credentials were valid but whether his conclusions were scientifically sound .
Among every reputable expert who has looked at the fire , the answer to the latter is a resounding no .
The problem of expert witnesses who peddle junk science is hardly unique to fire cases .
It cuts across virtually all areas of forensic analysis , from bullets to bite marks .
Among such disciplines , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ success story — a field that has spent the past decades getting on firmer scientific footing .
Yet , for those people imprisoned for old arson crimes based on flawed methodology , there is no clear path to exoneration .
By the time of Garrett ’ s retrial , there should have been a way to effectively challenge flawed forensic evidence before Cooper ever took the stand .
A landmark U.S. Supreme Court case — Daubert v. Merrell Dow Chemicals — had created new parameters for expert testimony in federal trials , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But Garrett ’ s case shows how lawyers and judges were ill-equipped to apply it .
In a transcript from the 2003 retrial , Garrett ’ s trial attorney Dwight Scott asks Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Seth Norman for permission to question Cooper “ both on his qualifications and his ability to render a scientific opinion that there was a pour pattern in this house.
” In such a pretrial proceeding , known as a Daubert hearing , the judge is supposed to act as a “ gatekeeper ” to decide whether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Norman was immediately skeptical — and seemingly unaware of what Daubert allowed .
“ You ’ re just wanting a preview of what the man ’ s gon na say , ” he said , grudgingly allowing Scott to briefly question Cooper .
Scott asked Cooper to explain the scientific method .
“ Right now I don ’ t want to answer that , ” Cooper replied , adding that he would have to get into too much research .
“ Well , would you agree that it ’ s simply just formulating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Scott asked .
Cooper deflected .
His process was to take what he saw at the scene and consider it alongside witness interviews and other circumstantial evidence .
“ A lot of experts try to reduplicate the fire , ” he added .
But he preferred to look at the whole picture .
In this case , “ the most important thing that I needed to know , ” he said , came down to the door to the room where Lance was found .
“ You needed to know where the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ order to make a determination about where the origin of the fire was ?
” Scott asked .
“ It ’ s part of the puzzle , Mr. Scott , ” Cooper replied .
When I met Cooper outside his home in 2018 , he reiterated the importance of the lock .
But he could not answer why , if it was so central to the case , he had not bothered to preserve or study it more closely .
As the late fire scientist Gerald Hurst told me in 2014 , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off the door , or taken the whole door .
And you would have had the laboratory look at it .
And they didn ’ t do any of that.
” In his 2016 affidavit , Lentini revealed how consequential this failure was .
“ Agent Cooper was shockingly uninterested in the fact that the fire left carbon deposits on the sliding bolt showing that the bolt was slid to the right at the time of the fire , ” he wrote .
According to his analysis of the evidence , not only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was not even closed.
” As I left the house at 114 Broadway in December , Bayne was still working inside .
He had torn out much of the carpet , revealing what looked like old burn marks at the entrance of the bedroom floor .
But inside the living room , the floors had been replaced , destroying the visual evidence that Cooper had called “ pour patterns ” almost 28 years before .
Bayne also took measurements of the walls , windows , and doorways .
An engineer has agreed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ model — a common way to recreate and study a fire scenario — and he was hoping to convince another expert to undertake a separate simulation .
A fire investigator who “ is passionate about getting it right does not really ever stop evaluating a fire scene , ” Bayne later wrote in an email .
Indeed , despite Cooper ’ s dismissive attitude toward fire recreations , test fires are a critical way to understand fire scenarios .
It is through such experiments — live burns carried out by federal agencies and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most important breakthroughs have been made .
People like Garrett don ’ t generally have the resources for such tests , although that has not kept Bayne from trying .
Among the endless appeals for help he has written was a 2017 letter to the United States Fire Administration .
Given the role of a federal agency in sending Garrett to prison for life , why shouldn ’ t a federal agency help reexamine the case ?
The U.S. Fire Administration declined to get involved .
But Bayne has not given up on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the house remains intact .
Along with a 42-page report he drafted after his visit to Old Hickory , he is planning to make a similar appeal to the ATF itself .
As he wrote in his previous letter , the home could be purchased and restored as closely as possible to its 1992 furnishings .
“ Then , conduct two sets of burn tests on two hypotheses ( one intentional , one unintentional ) .
” One would test the state ’ s theory and the other his own .
“ Imagine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ house where the 1992 event occurred , ” Bayne wrote .
“ What an exciting and revealing experiment it could be !
”

Stuart Bayne stepped inside the house at 114 Broadway Street and let out a deep sigh. He stood still for a moment, then walked slowly toward the back of the house. For a minute he said nothing, his footsteps echoing throughout the empty rooms. The walls were painted bright colors — the living room was deep burgundy, the kitchen mustard yellow — but the space felt grim and cold. Bayne entered the laundry room, a small, dirty space with white walls. He placed his hand on his heart and grimaced. This was the room where Lorie Lee Lance had died in a fire almost 28 years earlier.
Bayne wore glasses, dark coveralls, and brown work boots. It was a frigid Tuesday in December, the week before Christmas. He’d driven to the house in Old Hickory, Tennessee, just north of Nashville, in a Jeep 4×4 advertising his business: The Fire PI: Confidential Origin and Cause Investigations. The vehicle was filled with supplies — hard hats, flashlights, and a portable generator. On the passenger’s seat was the 2017 edition of the National Fire Protection Association’s seminal handbook, “NFPA 921: Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigators.”
The first edition of “NFPA 921” was published in 1992, just weeks before the fire at 114 Broadway. In the years to come, it would revolutionize Bayne’s profession. Until that point, fire investigators had been taught to rely on instinct and their interpretation of visual evidence at the scene to determine a fire’s origin and cause. But “NFPA 921” replaced this approach with the scientific method: gathering evidence to test a hypothesis to figure out how a fire began. Critically, the text also dispelled long-standing myths about fire behavior, debunking the visual clues that experts once associated with arson. Irregular burn marks known as “pour patterns,” for example, long seen as evidence of a liquid accelerant, were actually produced by a phenomenon called flashover — the moment a fire in a room becomes a room on fire.
But these revelations came too late for the fire that killed Lance. When investigators arrived at the house on February 24, 1992, they seized on a large “pour pattern” on the living room floor, along with a container of kerosene found in the kitchen. Lance’s boyfriend, 35-year-old Claude Garrett, who survived the fire, insisted that he did not know how it started, explaining that the couple used kerosene to heat their home during the winter. But he soon fell under suspicion. Prosecutors said he locked Lance in the laundry room at the back of the house, poured kerosene onto the living room floor, and left her to die.
Views of the utility room nearly three decades after the 1992 fire, on Dec. 17, 2019. Photos: Liliana Segura/The Intercept
There should have been doubts about this theory from the start. After being convicted of murder and sentenced to life in 1993, Garrett won a new trial after uncovering evidence withheld by the state, which indicated that the door to the back room had not been locked at all. But in 2003, a new jury sent Garrett back to prison, much to the distress of Bayne, who was hired as an expert witness for the retrial. He was convinced the case was a miscarriage of justice — a conviction based on junk science that had long since been debunked. For nearly 20 years Bayne has been trying to explain this to anyone who will listen. Nevertheless, as we stood inside the house that day, Garrett was facing yet another Christmas behind bars.
As we stood inside the house that day, Garrett was facing yet another Christmas behind bars.
I first met Bayne for an investigation into Garrett’s case published in 2015. After our initial meeting, he tried to visit the house but was turned away by a resident. He’d been inside only once before — in 2002, thanks to a renter who gave him brief access — and was desperate to return. Although Bayne had pored over the evidence in the case countless times, he wrote to me, “a fire investigator needs to stand in the very spot (a.k.a., the room of origin) and revisit the event in his mind’s eye.”
The one-story cinderblock home remained standing after the fire, its basic structure intact. Now the owner was preparing to sell it; like many of the old houses in Nashville’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, it would likely be torn down. Bayne had one last chance to look at the house up close, to consider what, if anything, it could tell him about the fire.
Although he cannot prove it for sure, Bayne’s theory has always been that a burning cigarette started the fire. Garrett and Lance were both smokers; they had gone out drinking the night before, then returned and watched TV in the living room. A loveseat had been fully consumed in the blaze, which Bayne believed was the point of origin. Today, a qualified investigator would clear out the debris at the scene and then reconstruct the room as accurately as possible, returning surviving furnishings to their original locations in order to study how the fire progressed. But this didn’t happen in 1992: Investigators discarded the furniture onto the front lawn.
Bayne stepped into the living room and rattled off its former contents. “Loveseat. Couch. Fish tank. Entertainment center.” Then he turned right, into the bedroom. He recounted Garrett’s account of the fire, a scenario he had been replaying in his mind for years. How Garrett awoke in the early morning hours, smelled smoke, saw a glow in the living room. How he woke up Lance, ran with her toward the front door. Bayne reached for my hand as he turned right from the bedroom and walked me toward the front door. He opened it. But, “she turns, heads for the back. He goes out the front only to realize that she’s not with him.”
It all happened so fast, Bayne said. With the front door open, oxygen fed the fire, devouring the living room’s cluttered contents, consuming the wood paneling on the walls. It would have taken almost no time at all for the room to reach flashover. By the time Lance got to the back room, “this house was charged with smoke. And in a few breaths, she’s collapsed.”
Inside the laundry room, Bayne shoved the back door open, a gust of cold air entering from the backyard. That door was not there in 1992. There was a boarded up window, instead. Garrett has explained that he’d accidentally broken the window months before the fire, and the landlord would not fix it. But prosecutors said Garrett had covered the window on purpose — all part of the plan to kill Lance.
Bayne did not believe this. He believed in Garrett’s innocence. He paused and sighed again. “If only there was a door.”
Stuart Bayne sits in front of the house at 114 Broadway Street in Old Hickory, Tenn., on Dec. 17, 2019. Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept
The Long Shadow of Junk Science
This week marked the 28th year since the fire in Old Hickory. For Garrett, now 63, the anniversary comes at a particularly painful time. His stepfather died suddenly last year, and in early February, his mother was admitted to the hospital for heart surgery, only to be told that she would likely only survive another six months.
In the meantime, exonerations in old arson crimes continue. Last year, Robert Yell was exonerated in Kentucky after 15 years behind bars for a fire that killed his two children. Like Garrett, Yell was initially described as responding hysterically to the fire — and like Garrett, his clothes tested negative for any liquid accelerants. Although Yell’s arson prosecution took place well after Garrett’s initial conviction, it rested on the same kind of junk science once used to charge people for arson. Meanwhile, not a single U.S. state apart from Texas has undertaken a systematic review of old arson cases.
Nevertheless, there are some new reasons for optimism for Garrett. A TV special reexamining the Old Hickory fire is set to air soon on the network Investigation Discovery, which promises to bring scrutiny to the case. More importantly, an application to the Davidson County District Attorney General’s Conviction Review Unit, filed by Garrett’s attorneys last summer, is pending in Nashville. Although the application guidelines dictate that the CRU will only examine cases in which appeals have been exhausted — something that has not yet happened in Garrett’s case — the office seems open to revisiting the case.
Photo: Courtesy of Claude Garrett
There has also been a series of important legal victories. In 2016, Garrett challenged his conviction in state court based in part on new reports by leading fire experts who concluded that there was no reliable evidence of arson in his case. One affidavit, by renowned fire scientist John Lentini, further debunked the so-called pour patterns as proof that kerosene had been used to start the fire. A 2013 study revealed that ignitable liquids burn up quickly in fires, Lentini wrote, “and do not cause the kind of charring found on the floor of the Garrett residence.” The state court rejected Garrett’s challenge, but last fall, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Tennessee — a chance to litigate claims that have not received a hearing in court.
Finally, in December 2019, a federal district court authorized evidence-gathering on a nagging question: whether lead investigator James F. Cooper, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the state’s star witness against Garrett, misrepresented his credentials on the stand. At the 1993 and 2003 trials, Cooper testified that he was certified with the International Association of Arson Investigators. But in a March 2019 letter to Garrett’s new appellate attorney, the organization showed certification only from 2007 to 2012. If Cooper misled the court about his qualifications, it could be grounds for a new trial.
It may well be that Cooper was, in fact, certified at the time of the trials — and that the issue lies with the IAAI’s record-keeping. But even if he did not commit perjury on this point, it would not make Cooper’s testimony any less flawed. When it comes to his analysis of the fire, the central question is not whether his official credentials were valid but whether his conclusions were scientifically sound. Among every reputable expert who has looked at the fire, the answer to the latter is a resounding no.
Photo: Courtesy of Claude Garrett
The problem of expert witnesses who peddle junk science is hardly unique to fire cases. It cuts across virtually all areas of forensic analysis, from bullets to bite marks. Among such disciplines, fire investigation is in many ways a success story — a field that has spent the past decades getting on firmer scientific footing. Yet, for those people imprisoned for old arson crimes based on flawed methodology, there is no clear path to exoneration.
By the time of Garrett’s retrial, there should have been a way to effectively challenge flawed forensic evidence before Cooper ever took the stand. A landmark U.S. Supreme Court case — Daubert v. Merrell Dow Chemicals — had created new parameters for expert testimony in federal trials, which Tennessee adopted along with other states. But Garrett’s case shows how lawyers and judges were ill-equipped to apply it.
For people imprisoned for old arson crimes based on flawed methodology, there is no clear path to exoneration.
In a transcript from the 2003 retrial, Garrett’s trial attorney Dwight Scott asks Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Seth Norman for permission to question Cooper “both on his qualifications and his ability to render a scientific opinion that there was a pour pattern in this house.” In such a pretrial proceeding, known as a Daubert hearing, the judge is supposed to act as a “gatekeeper” to decide whether evidence is admissible at trial. But Norman was immediately skeptical — and seemingly unaware of what Daubert allowed. “You’re just wanting a preview of what the man’s gonna say,” he said, grudgingly allowing Scott to briefly question Cooper.
Scott asked Cooper to explain the scientific method. “Right now I don’t want to answer that,” Cooper replied, adding that he would have to get into too much research. “Well, would you agree that it’s simply just formulating, gathering data and then hypothesis?” Scott asked. Cooper deflected. His process was to take what he saw at the scene and consider it alongside witness interviews and other circumstantial evidence. “A lot of experts try to reduplicate the fire,” he added. But he preferred to look at the whole picture. In this case, “the most important thing that I needed to know,” he said, came down to the door to the room where Lance was found.
“You needed to know where the victim was in the storage room in order to make a determination about where the origin of the fire was?” Scott asked. “It’s part of the puzzle, Mr. Scott,” Cooper replied.
When I met Cooper outside his home in 2018, he reiterated the importance of the lock. But he could not answer why, if it was so central to the case, he had not bothered to preserve or study it more closely. As the late fire scientist Gerald Hurst told me in 2014, “Logically, you would have taken it off the door, or taken the whole door. And you would have had the laboratory look at it. And they didn’t do any of that.” In his 2016 affidavit, Lentini revealed how consequential this failure was.
“Agent Cooper was shockingly uninterested in the fact that the fire left carbon deposits on the sliding bolt showing that the bolt was slid to the right at the time of the fire,” he wrote. According to his analysis of the evidence, not only was the door unlocked, “it was not even closed.”
Stuart Bayne examines the living room floor inside 114 Broadway Street on Dec. 17, 2019. Burn patterns were used by the state as proof that Claude Garrett poured kerosene on the floor to kill Lorie Lee Lance, but such evidence is considered junk science today. Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept
House on Fire
As I left the house at 114 Broadway in December, Bayne was still working inside. He had torn out much of the carpet, revealing what looked like old burn marks at the entrance of the bedroom floor. But inside the living room, the floors had been replaced, destroying the visual evidence that Cooper had called “pour patterns” almost 28 years before.
Bayne also took measurements of the walls, windows, and doorways. An engineer has agreed to use the data to create a computer model — a common way to recreate and study a fire scenario — and he was hoping to convince another expert to undertake a separate simulation. A fire investigator who “is passionate about getting it right does not really ever stop evaluating a fire scene,” Bayne later wrote in an email.
Indeed, despite Cooper’s dismissive attitude toward fire recreations, test fires are a critical way to understand fire scenarios. It is through such experiments — live burns carried out by federal agencies and private labs — that some of the most important breakthroughs have been made. People like Garrett don’t generally have the resources for such tests, although that has not kept Bayne from trying. Among the endless appeals for help he has written was a 2017 letter to the United States Fire Administration. Given the role of a federal agency in sending Garrett to prison for life, why shouldn’t a federal agency help reexamine the case?
Photo: Courtesy of Claude Garrett
The U.S. Fire Administration declined to get involved. But Bayne has not given up on the idea, especially as long as the house remains intact. He is planning to make a similar appeal to the ATF itself. As he wrote in his previous letter, the home could be purchased and restored as closely as possible to its 1992 furnishings. “Then, conduct two sets of burn tests on two hypotheses (one intentional, one unintentional).” One would test the state’s theory and the other his own.
“Imagine testing these two ideas in the very house where the 1992 event occurred,” Bayne wrote. “What an exciting and revealing experiment it could be!”


theintercept--2020-02-29--Cronyism and Conflicts of Interest in Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force

the Secretary of Health and Human Services , admitted Wednesday that a vaccine for the coronavirus might not be affordable for all Americans .
“ We can ’ t control that price , ” Azar told Rep. Jan Schakowsky , D-Ill. , during a congressional hearing about the virus , which has been spreading throughout the world and is widely expected to become a serious public health issue in the United States .
After a wave of criticism from Democrats , Azar walked the comment back the next day , saying that he would ensure public access to a vaccine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one should be developed .
But Azar , who served as the top lobbyist for Eli Lilly before becoming president of the drug company ’ s U.S. operations in 2012 and the secretary of Health and Human Services in 2018 , knows of what he unthinkingly speaks .
Exorbitant drug pricing often leaves life-saving treatment out of reach for the poorest Americans .
And to the extent that Azar and the other businessmen who make up the majority of the president ’ s task force on the coronavirus have any experience with pharmaceuticals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the economy , it ’ s been making money off the system that keeps them out of reach .
In the case of Azar , who earned nearly $ 2 million during his last year at Lilly , that profit came at the expense of the people who needed the drugs , according to a lawsuit filed in 2017 .
While Azar was leading the pharmaceutical giant , the cost of its drugs went up significantly .
In particular , insulin sold by the company more than doubled in price .
According @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Novo Nordisk and Sanofi , Eli Lilly engaged in a scheme to artificially inflate the price of its drug , leaving some diabetic people unable to pay the cost and forced to use expired insulin or none at all .
Eli Lilly did not immediately respond to a request for comment but the company has told other publications that the suit has no merit and that it follows the “ highest ethical standards.
” For another task force member , the profits could come from the coronavirus itself .
Joseph Grogan was a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before he joined the Trump administration as director of the Domestic Policy Council and led the Drug Pricing and Innovation Work Group .
On Wednesday , after Gilead announced that it would be starting two clinical trials of an antiviral drug that could be used to treat the virus , the company ’ s stock price surged .
As a former lobbyist for a company that stands to gain hugely from a possible treatment for the virus , Grogan ’ s participation on the task force poses a host of ethical problems , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ psychiatry and director of the bioethics master ’ s program at Columbia University .
“ Does he have a conflict of interest ?
Yes !
” said Klitzman , who points out that the government is likely to spend money on both the research and purchase of treatments for the virus .
“ Gilead could help shape a government request for proposals so that they could have an unfair advantage.
” While Grogan appears to have sold his Gilead stock and , according to the Office of Management and Budget , has severed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump pledge , ” the situation is still problematic , according to Klitzman .
“ When he gets out of office , they could give him a gift for doing a good job or just hire him again .
And what about his buddies ?
I ’ m sure he is still close to people who work for Gilead who will benefit .
These are all major ethical concerns.
” Although Grogan and his friends may have a lot to gain from his participation on the task force , it is not clear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others serving on the group bring to it .
Of the task force ’ s 16 members — 17 , if you include Vice President Mike Pence , who is heading the effort — only four have any training in science or medicine .
The others mostly hail from the business world , including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin , an investment banker who was sued for asset stripping ; Ken Cuccinelli , a lawyer and self-described “ opponent of homosexuality ” now serving as acting deputy secretary of homeland security ; and Christopher @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and General Motors , who worked with Jared Kushner on the modernization of federal IT systems before directing the country ’ s response to what may be the biggest public health crisis in over a century .
Vice President Pence also named Larry Kudlow to the task force on Thursday .
Kudlow , a top economic advisor to Trump who used to work for Bear Stearns , went on Fox Business to reassure the American public that reports of increasing coronavirus infections around the world don ’ t necessarily mean “ that this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ America.
” Kudlow then encouraged everyone to keep investing , saying , “ Stocks look pretty cheap to me.
” President Trump has fired many of the people who actually know how to coordinate government responses to epidemics .
As Laurie Garrett reported in January , the president shut down the National Security Council ’ s global health security unit and cut $ 15 billion in national health spending , including funding for the management of infectious global diseases at the CDC , DHS , and HHS .
At the CDC , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were so severe , Garrett wrote , that “ the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10.
” While four doctors are on the task force , it ’ s not clear how much they will be allowed to direct the response to the virus .
The White House reportedly told Anthony Fauci , an immunologist who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and has extensive experience combating infectious diseases , not to speak publicly without clearance after he said at a meeting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well to human species.
” On Thursday , Deborah Birx , a physician who has served as the U.S .
Global AIDS Coordinator since 2014 , was named as the White House coronavirus response coordinator , and Surgeon General Jerome Adams was added to the task force .
Their appointments came after Bernie Sanders slammed Trump for putting “ political cronies , not scientists ” in charge of the government response to the virus .

Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, admitted Wednesday that a vaccine for a new coronavirus might not be affordable for all Americans. “We can’t control that price,” Azar told Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., during a congressional hearing about the novel strain, which has been spreading throughout the world and is widely expected to become a serious public health issue in the United States.
After a wave of criticism from Democrats, Azar walked the comment back the next day, saying that he would ensure public access to a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, if one should be developed. But Azar, who served as the top lobbyist for Eli Lilly before becoming president of the drug company’s U.S. operations in 2012 and the secretary of health and human Services in 2018, knows of what he unthinkingly speaks. Exorbitant drug pricing often leaves life-saving treatment out of reach for the poorest Americans. And to the extent that Azar and the other businessmen who make up the majority of the president’s coronavirus task force have any experience with pharmaceuticals, one of the most profitable sectors of the economy, it’s been making money off the system that keeps them out of reach.
In the case of Azar, who earned nearly $2 million during his last year at Lilly, that profit came at the expense of the people who needed the drugs, according to a lawsuit filed in 2017. While Azar was leading the pharmaceutical giant, the cost of its drugs went up significantly. In particular, insulin sold by the company more than doubled in price. According to the suit, which also names Novo Nordisk and Sanofi, Eli Lilly engaged in a scheme to artificially inflate the price of its drug, leaving some diabetic people unable to pay the cost and forced to use expired insulin or none at all. Eli Lilly did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company has told other publications that the suit has no merit and that it follows the “highest ethical standards.”
For another task force member, the profits could come from the coronavirus itself. Joseph Grogan was a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences before he joined the Trump administration as director of the Domestic Policy Council and led the Drug Pricing and Innovation Work Group. On Wednesday, after Gilead announced that it would be starting two clinical trials of an antiviral drug that could be used to treat Covid-19, the company’s stock price surged.
As a former lobbyist for a company that stands to gain big from a possible treatment for the respiratory disease, Grogan’s participation on the task force poses a host of ethical problems, according to Robert Klitzman, professor of psychiatry and director of the bioethics master’s program at Columbia University. “Does he have a conflict of interest? Yes!” said Klitzman, who points out that the government is likely to spend money on both the research and purchase of treatments for the virus. “Gilead could help shape a government request for proposals so that they could have an unfair advantage.”
While Grogan appears to have sold his Gilead stock and, according to the Office of Management and Budget, has severed all financial relationships and taken “the Trump pledge,” the situation is still problematic, according to Klitzman. “When he gets out of office, they could give him a gift for doing a good job or just hire him again. And what about his buddies? I’m sure he is still close to people who work for Gilead who will benefit. These are all major ethical concerns.”
Although Grogan and his friends may have a lot to gain from his participation on the task force, it is not clear what expertise he and most of the others serving on the group bring to it. Of the task force’s 16 members — 17, if you include Vice President Mike Pence, who is heading the effort — only four have any training in science or medicine. The others mostly hail from the business world, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, an investment banker who was sued for asset stripping; Ken Cuccinelli, a lawyer and self-described “opponent of homosexuality” now serving as acting deputy secretary of homeland security; and Christopher Liddell, a former executive at Microsoft and General Motors, who worked with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner on the modernization of federal IT systems before directing the country’s response to what may be the biggest public health crisis in over a century.
Pence also named Larry Kudlow to the task force on Thursday. Kudlow, a top economic adviser to Trump who used to work for Bear Stearns, went on Fox Business to reassure the American public that reports of increasing coronavirus infections around the world don’t necessarily mean “that this thing is going to skyrocket in North America.” Kudlow then encouraged everyone to keep investing, saying, “Stocks look pretty cheap to me.”
Trump has fired many of the people who actually know how to coordinate government responses to epidemics. As Laurie Garrett reported in January, the president shut down the National Security Council’s global health security unit and cut $15 billion in national health spending, including funding for the management of infectious global diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Homeland Security, and HHS. At the CDC, the funding cuts to the global health section were so severe, Garrett wrote, that “the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10.”
While four doctors are on the task force, it’s not clear how much they will be allowed to direct the response to the virus. The White House reportedly told Anthony Fauci, an immunologist who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and has extensive experience combating infectious diseases, not to speak publicly without clearance after he said at a meeting that the virus “has adapted extremely well to human species.”
On Thursday, Deborah Birx, a physician who has served as the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator since 2014, was named as the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams was added to the task force. Their appointments came after Sen. Bernie Sanders slammed Trump for putting “political cronies, not scientists” in charge of the government response to the virus.


theintercept--2020-02-29--An American Evacuated From China Was Quarantined on CDC Orders, Then Got a Bill for It

Frank Wucinski , who has lived and worked in China for 15 years , said in an interview on Friday that he was aware when he boarded the converted cargo plane in Wuhan with his three-year-old daughter Annabel that he would have to reimburse the United States government for the steep cost of the flight .
But after they both tested negative for the virus and were released from the Rady Children ’ s Hospital in San Diego , Wucinski was shocked to receive a bill for the government-mandated stay there .
An American man who was evacuated by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where his father-in-law died of the coronavirus this month — was forced to pay $ 2,200 for the flight and billed by a San Diego hospital for the six days he and his daughter spent in mandatory quarantine there , following an order from the CDC .
Because he works for a British cultural agency in China , Wucinski has health insurance there that does not cover costs in the U.S .
He publicized the bill on a GoFundMe page he set up this month to help tide him over until he regains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
His bank only issues one card per family , Wucinski said , and he had to leave it with his wife , Li , who stayed behind in Wuhan to care for her father .
Li , who is a Chinese citizen , also contracted the virus but has now made a full recovery , Wucinski said .
Still , she remains stranded in Wuhan and will not be able to join her husband and daughter until the lockdown to slow the spread of the virus is lifted .
After Wucinski drew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a spokesman for the hospital , confirmed to The Intercept on Friday that it was issued , but said that it was sent to Wucinski in error .
The hospital initially had trouble reaching Wucinski to let him know that he would not have to pay the bill , but Metcalf said that the hospital will ask the federal government to pay for the quarantine ordered by the CDC .
The incident highlighted how the American government ’ s response to a public health emergency , like trying to contain a potential @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relying on a system built around private hospitals and for-profit health insurance providers .
Last month , a man in Miami who returned from a work trip to China feeling sick went to a hospital to be tested for coronavirus .
The test came back negative , but his high-deductible health insurance provider told him he would have to pay at least $ 1,400 , the Miami Herald reported , and provide three years of medical records to prove that the flu he got was not related to a preexisting condition .
Without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 3,270 for getting tested .
The CDC botched the testing process for another evacuee from China who was quarantined at a nearby hospital , UC San Diego Health .
That woman was released after testing negative for the coronavirus , but had to be moved back into quarantine after the CDC discovered that her sample had been mislabelled and she did have the virus , which is now being called COVID-19 by the World Health Organization .
Wucinski was difficult to reach on Friday in part because he was bombarded with snarky @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fox News .
During the interview with Fox , Wucinski coughed and took a drink from a water bottle he shared with his daughter , which led to a deluge of criticism on social networks from people who appeared to be unaware that both had tested negative for coronavirus .
Wucinski told The Intercept that he was more concerned with the high cost of securing health insurance for himself and his daughter during their emergency stay with family in Pennsylvania than with the heckling on Twitter .
Still , he took a minute @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sent his way which read : “ Make sure we all vote so we don ’ t need to crowdfund just to be able to pay for our basic health care.
” The CDC and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests to comment , but The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Americans evacuated from China would be required “ to sign a promissory note for the cost of the flight , which is expected to be many times the price of a commercial flight from China to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boasted this week about what he called “ America ’ s world-leading response to the coronavirus outbreak , not just at home , but abroad as well.
” Update : Feb. 29 , 12:54 p.m. PT A spokesman for Rady Children ’ s Hospital confirmed on Saturday that the staff there was prompted to review the bill sent to Frank Wucinski on Friday after a New York Times reporter , Sarah Kliff , contacted them to ask about it .
Wucinski told The Times that even though the hospital was no longer asking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quarantine there , the ambulance company that brought him from the U.S. military base in San Diego to Rady , American Medical Response , charged him $ 2,598 for what ’ s typically a 15-minute drive .
He was also charged $ 90 by the radiologists who read patients ’ X-rays and are not employed by the hospital .
Correction : Feb. 28 , 11:30 p.m. PT An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the hospital where a patient infected with the coronavirus was mistakenly cleared and released .
It was UC @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Hospital .

An American man who was evacuated by the State Department from Wuhan, China — where his father-in-law died of the coronavirus this month — was forced to pay $2,200 for the flight and billed by a San Diego hospital for the six days he and his daughter spent in mandatory quarantine there, following an order from the CDC.
Frank Wucinski, who has lived and worked in China for 15 years, said in an interview on Friday that he was aware when he boarded the converted cargo plane in Wuhan with his three-year-old daughter Annabel that he would have to reimburse the United States government for the steep cost of the flight. But after they both tested negative for the virus and were released from the Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, Wucinski was shocked to receive a bill for the government-mandated stay there.
Finally released from quarantine. Thanks for everything, MCAS Miramar and everyone else! #MCASMiramar #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/ca1atiTjDX — Frank Wucinski (@FWucinski) February 20, 2020
Because he works for a British cultural agency in China, Wucinski has health insurance there that does not cover costs in the U.S. He publicized the bill on a GoFundMe page he set up this month to help tide him over until he regains access to his bank account in China. His bank only issues one card per family, Wucinski said, and he had to leave it with his wife, Li, who stayed behind in Wuhan to care for her father. Li, who is a Chinese citizen, also contracted the virus but has now made a full recovery, Wucinski said. Still, she remains stranded in Wuhan and will not be able to join her husband and daughter until the lockdown to slow the spread of the virus is lifted.
After Wucinski drew attention to the bill, Ben Metcalf, a spokesman for the hospital, confirmed to The Intercept on Friday that it was issued, but said that it was sent to Wucinski in error. The hospital initially had trouble reaching Wucinski to let him know that he would not have to pay the bill, but Metcalf said that the hospital will ask the federal government to pay for the quarantine ordered by the CDC.
The incident highlighted how the American government’s response to a public health emergency, like trying to contain a potential coronavirus epidemic, could be handicapped by relying on a system built around private hospitals and for-profit health insurance providers. Last month, a man in Miami who returned from a work trip to China feeling sick went to a hospital to be tested for coronavirus. The test came back negative, but his high-deductible health insurance provider told him he would have to pay at least $1,400, the Miami Herald reported, and provide three years of medical records to prove that the flu he got was not related to a preexisting condition. Without producing the records, he would owe $3,270 for getting tested.
The CDC botched the testing process for another evacuee from China who was quarantined at a nearby hospital, UC San Diego Health. That woman was released after testing negative for the coronavirus, but had to be moved back into quarantine after the CDC discovered that her sample had been mislabelled and she did have the virus, which is now being called COVID-19 by the World Health Organization.
Wucinski was difficult to reach on Friday in part because he was bombarded with snarky messages on Twitter following an appearance on Fox News. During the interview with Fox, Wucinski coughed and took a drink from a water bottle he shared with his daughter, which led to a deluge of criticism on social networks from people who appeared to be unaware that both had tested negative for coronavirus.
Wucinski told The Intercept that he was more concerned with the high cost of securing health insurance for himself and his daughter during their emergency stay with family in Pennsylvania than with the heckling on Twitter. Still, he took a minute early Friday morning to retweet one comment sent his way which read: “Make sure we all vote so we don’t need to crowdfund just to be able to pay for our basic health care.”
The CDC and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests to comment, but The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Americans evacuated from China would be required “to sign a promissory note for the cost of the flight, which is expected to be many times the price of a commercial flight from China to the U.S.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo boasted this week about what he called “America’s world-leading response to the coronavirus outbreak, not just at home, but abroad as well.”
Update: Feb. 29, 12:54 p.m. PT
A spokesman for Rady Children’s Hospital confirmed on Saturday that the staff there was prompted to review the bill sent to Frank Wucinski on Friday after a New York Times reporter, Sarah Kliff, contacted them to ask about it. Wucinski told The Times that even though the hospital was no longer asking him to pay for his stay in quarantine there, the ambulance company that brought him from the U.S. military base in San Diego to Rady, American Medical Response, charged him $2,598 for what’s typically a 15-minute drive. He was also charged $90 by the radiologists who read patients’ X-rays and are not employed by the hospital.
Correction: Feb. 28, 11:30 p.m. PT
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the hospital where a patient infected with the coronavirus was mistakenly cleared and released. It was UC San Diego Health, not Rady Children’s Hospital.


theintercept--2020-03-02--Human Rights Watch Took Money From Saudi Businessman After Documenting His Coercive Labor Practices

accepted a sizable donation from a Saudi billionaire shortly after its researchers documented labor abuses at one of the man ’ s companies , a potential violation of the rights group ’ s own fundraising guidance .
Human Rights Watch recently returned the gift from Saudi real estate magnate Mohammed Bin Issa Al Jaber , which came with the caveat that it could not be used to support the group ’ s LGBT advocacy in the Middle East and North Africa .
The controversial donation is at the center of a contentious internal debate about the judgment and leadership of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
After The Intercept began investigating the donation , the rights group published a statement on its website saying that accepting the funding was a “ deeply regrettable decision ” that “ stood in stark contrast to our core values and our longstanding commitment to LGBT rights as an integral part of human rights.
” The 2012 grant from al-Jaber ’ s UK-based charitable foundation amounted to more than $ 200,000 per year for several years , two Human Rights Watch employees said .
The group ’ s statement did not refer to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confirmed his identity to The Intercept .
“ We also regret that the grant was made by the owner of a company that Human Rights Watch had previously identified as complicit in labor rights abuse , ” the group ’ s statement said .
In 2012 and previous years , Human Rights Watch reported extensively on labor violations at Jadawel International , a Saudi construction company founded and owned by al-Jaber .
Managers at Jadawel took passports from unskilled migrant workers and failed to renew their Saudi residency permits , effectively trapping laborers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ silence for fear of arrest , according to a 2010 HRW report .
That arrangement allowed managers to underpay staff ; workers told Human Rights Watch that some had gone months without pay .
Roth was himself involved in soliciting the donation according to an internal Human Rights Watch email sent last month and obtained by The Intercept .
The email was written on behalf of the group ’ s international board of directors and signed by the board ’ s co-chairs , Amy Rao and Neil Rimer .
In 2012 , Roth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ containing language that said the gift could not be used for LGBT rights work in the region .
He was later pictured next to al-Jaber at a 2013 ceremony to memorialize the funding .
“ By accepting a pledge excluding its use for work on a group whose rights we strive to protect , the people involved at Human Rights Watch , Inc. made a serious error in judgment , ” Rao and Rimer wrote to staff .
“ Ken Roth , the most senior person at HRW involved with soliciting this pledge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Roth did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication .

Human Rights Watch accepted a sizable donation from a Saudi billionaire shortly after its researchers documented labor abuses at one of the man’s companies, a potential violation of the rights group’s own fundraising guidance.
Human Rights Watch recently returned the gift from Saudi real estate magnate Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber, which came with the caveat that it could not be used to support the group’s LGBT advocacy in the Middle East and North Africa. The controversial donation is at the center of a contentious internal debate about the judgment and leadership of Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth.
After The Intercept began investigating the donation, the rights group published a statement on its website saying that accepting the funding was a “deeply regrettable decision” that “stood in stark contrast to our core values and our longstanding commitment to LGBT rights as an integral part of human rights.”
The 2012 grant from Al Jaber’s U.K.-based charitable foundation amounted to $470,000, Roth told The Intercept, adding that a “final pledge installment was never realized.” The statement did not refer to Al Jaber by name, but two Human Rights Watch employees confirmed his identity to The Intercept.
“We also regret that the grant was made by the owner of a company that Human Rights Watch had previously identified as complicit in labor rights abuse,” the group’s statement said. In 2012 and previous years, Human Rights Watch reported extensively on labor violations at Jadawel International, a Saudi construction company founded and owned by Al Jaber.
Managers at Jadawel took passports from unskilled migrant workers and failed to renew their Saudi residency permits, effectively trapping laborers and forcing them to keep working in silence for fear of arrest, according to a 2010 Human Rights Watch report. That arrangement allowed managers to underpay staff; workers told Human Rights Watch that some had gone months without pay.
Roth was himself involved in soliciting the donation, according to an internal Human Rights Watch email sent last month and obtained by The Intercept. The email was written on behalf of the group’s international board of directors and signed by the board’s co-chairs, Amy Rao and Neil Rimer.
In 2012, Roth signed a memorandum of understanding with Al Jaber containing language that said the gift could not be used for LGBT rights work in the region. He was later pictured next to Al Jaber at a 2013 ceremony to memorialize the funding.
“By accepting a pledge excluding its use for work on a group whose rights we strive to protect, the people involved at Human Rights Watch, Inc. made a serious error in judgment,” Rao and Rimer wrote to staff. “Ken Roth, the most senior person at HRW involved with soliciting this pledge, accepts full responsibility for this mistake.”
In an email to The Intercept, Roth said that he and others discussed the labor abuses at Jadawel “with the employer, who pledged to address them and later provided documentation to that effect. HRW and the employer then discussed a possible gift to HRW’s work, pending confirmation that the abuses had been resolved.” Roth also said the fallout from returning the donation has not impacted his management role at Human Rights Watch.
Photo: Gilles Rolle/REA/Redux
Human Rights Watch staff originally met with Al Jaber in 2010 as part of its advocacy process after researching his workers’ complaints, according to a Human Rights Watch employee. Their reporting continued the following year. Jadawel’s labor practices are mentioned in Human Rights Watch’s 2011 and 2012 World Reports as examples of the failures of Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship system to adequately protect migrant workers.
The 2012 report said some managers at Jadawel were “six months in arrears with salary payments,” and that “managers threatened workers not to pursue complaints in labor court.”
A fundraising policy approved by Human Rights Watch’s board later in 2012 said that the organization will not accept funding from a company that is “itself a focus of Human Rights Watch work,” or when “the solicitation or acceptance of such funds might undermine Human Rights Watch’s credibility, independence, or reputation.”
The donation was only recently made known to Human Rights Watch’s board, according to the internal email. But Al Jaber’s foundation announced the grant on its website in September 2013. “[His Excellency] Sheikh Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber, Founder and Chairman of the MBI Al Jaber Foundation, signed an agreement with Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, in order to support their work in the area of civil society in the Arab world, with particular reference to the cause of human rights in Arab countries in transition,” the announcement proclaimed.
Despite the restrictions on Al Jaber’s donation, Human Rights Watch continued to document LGBT rights violations in the region. In 2013, they joined a letter to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on LGBT rights and documented abuses against of transgender people in Kuwait. The following year, they published reports on LGBT rights in Morocco, Egypt, and Syria.
“Nevertheless, accepting a grant with such a condition was clearly wrong and is deeply disappointing to us,” Rao and Rimer wrote to staff last month.
Human Rights Watch will launch “a comprehensive independent investigation to understand why our stringent protocols and policies on vetting grants and donors failed,” according to its online statement.
“The investigation will start soon and will provide the basis for any further Board and management action,” the statement said. “To prevent this from happening again, we have created an additional policy explicitly prohibiting restrictions on gifts that would exclude particular social groups or fundamental rights issues.”
Update: March 2, 2020, 9:02 a.m. ET
This article has been updated to include a response and additional details from Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth that were received after publication.


theintercept--2020-03-02--Democrats Craving a Brokered Convention — Including Elizabeth Warren — Should Learn the Lessons of 1

Democrats Craving a Brokered Convention — Including Elizabeth Warren — Should Learn the Lessons of 1968

Democratic officials have insisted that Donald Trump is an unprecedented threat to the republic , a fascist and racist dictator whose removal from power is the paramount , if not the only , political priority .
Yet the strategy on which they are now explicitly relying to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders from being their 2020 presidential nominee — a brokered convention at which party elites anoint a nominee other than the one who receives the most votes and wins the most delegates during the primary process — is the one most likely to ensure Trump ’ s reelection .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ candidate , Lyndon Johnson , won the presidency in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history , with more than 60 percent of the popular vote and all but six states .
Four years later , it all came crashing down for the Democrats , as the once-left-for-dead Republican , Richard Nixon , not only reversed the Democrats ’ 1964 electoral gains , but also permanently obliterated many of their long-held regional strongholds , while winning an Electoral College landslide against the Democratic Party nominee , Johnson ’ s Vice President Hubert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against the third-party segregationist George Wallace , who swept five Southern states .
A major factor in that jarring outcome , if not the dispositive one , was the Democratic Party convention that took place in Chicago in late August , just slightly more than two months prior to the election .
The convention was a brokered one , marred by protests and riots outside the convention hall , and angry fights among delegates inside of it , that culminated in the anointing of the establishment candidate , Vice President Hubert Humphrey , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Sen. Eugene McCarthy .
McCarthy had entered the primary on a platform of opposing the Democratic Party ’ s commitment to the Vietnam War under Johnson , who had intended to seek reelection and was widely viewed as the favorite to win .
But the little-known Minnesota senator — driven at first by massive enthusiasm on the part of young anti-war voters — stunned Johnson by winning 42 % of the vote and the bulk of the delegates in the New Hampshire primary , forcing the incumbent president to announce that he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nomination .
The Democratic establishment , desperate over the anti-war sentiment overtaking the party , turned to Humphrey , as well as its arcane rules that allowed backroom deals to choose the nominee at the convention , in order to maintain its stranglehold over the party regardless of what the dirty masses of their voters thought or wanted .
Humphrey , knowing that he lacked grassroots support in the party , all but ignored the states with primaries , opting instead to compete for delegates only in the caucuses , which were controlled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they arrived at the Chicago convention , McCarthy had a huge lead over Humphrey in votes received , but none of the candidates had a majority of the committed delegates .
As the convention began , with anti-war and anti-Johnson protests growing outside , Johnson and Chicago Mayor and Democratic Party machine boss Richard J. Daley began maneuvering to ensure that delegates lined up behind Humphrey .
As the party ’ s left-wing , anti-war activists began realizing that the party ’ s bosses were going to nominate a candidate who had relied @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little grassroots approval , their anger grew .
It reached a boiling point as the establishment bosses used their control over the rule-making process to defeat anti-war planks in the platform .
In response , Daley ’ s police force became increasingly repressive and violent against his party ’ s anti-war left .
The Humphrey-supporting Chicago mayor was seen on national television using vulgar anti-Semitic slurs against the Jewish Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff after Ribicoff denounced Daley ’ s police for using what he called “ Gestapo tactics ” against the protesters , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ convention hall , and even network news journalists covering the increasingly ugly battles .
That intense conflict , disunity , and intraparty strife completely consumed the Democratic Party convention , crippling the messaging and candidacy of Hubert Humphrey .
To say that it spawned lingering resentment within the party and prevented unity heading into the general election is a massive understatement .
The millions of Democrats who had voted for McCarthy felt — with very good reason — that they had been undemocratically robbed by party bosses , led by Johnson and Daley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pro-establishment candidate by exploiting anti-democratic convention floor rules to subvert the anti-war , anti-establishment candidate who had received the most actual votes during the primary process .
The parallels to what the Democratic establishment is plotting to do to Sanders in 2020 is too obvious to require much elaboration .
Party leaders , and all of the remaining major candidates — including Joe Biden , Michael Bloomberg , and Elizabeth Warren — are making explicitly clear that the strategy on which they are relying is extremely similar to the one invoked by party @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nomination .
It is very difficult to understand why they would expect a different outcome .
Last Thursday , in an article notably entitled “ Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders , ” the New York Times reported that Democratic Party superdelegates were already plotting to deny Sanders the nomination even if he arrived in Milwaukee for the 2020 Democratic National Convention with the most votes and delegates but just shy of the majority needed to win on a first ballot .
These party officials , said the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance ” — by using tactics similar to those used by their 1968 predecessors to stop McCarthy and anoint Humphrey .
Then there ’ s Elizabeth Warren , whose ongoing presence in the race — despite having no realistic chance to win by any metric — is confounding many people .
But Warren ’ s campaign has made explicitly clear why she is remaining in the race : because she wants to prevent Sanders from securing a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brokered convention at which she can be chosen by party leaders and superdelegates — over the wishes of voters — to be the nominee .
On Saturday , the Massachusetts senator ’ s campaign proclaimed that “ no candidate will likely have a path to the majority of delegates ” — the classic self-fulfilling prophecy made far likelier by her ongoing siphoning of left-wing votes away from Sanders .
Indeed , the New York Times reported late last week that party insiders were delighted by her ongoing refusal to drop out ; they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ race and complicate Mr. Sanders ’ s efforts to consolidate the left.
” That her campaign is now being fueled by a richly funded super PAC whose dark-money donors at the moment remain anonymous , and whose support she refuses to renounce in direct violation of her repeated pledges , has only bolstered suspicions about the true function and purpose of her candidacy .
Warren ’ s campaign memo — as if it walked straight out of Richard Daley ’ s 1968 office — pronounced that “ Milwaukee is the final play ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ close to the most votes or delegates , she nonetheless intends to “ ultimately prevail , ” presumably through the smoke-filled backroom deals engineered by party bosses which she once pretended to disdain .
There ’ s another , more recent historical episode relevant here : the 2016 GOP primary , where Republican establishment leaders openly plotted to deny Trump the nomination if he arrived at the convention with a plurality but not a majority of delegates .
In response , Trump threatened that his supporters would engage in violence , telling CNN @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have riots .
I ’ m representing a tremendous many , many millions of people.
” He menacingly added : “ I think bad things would happen , I really do.
” Sanders , when asked this weekend on ABC News what would happen if he were denied the nomination despite having the most votes and delegates but remaining short of a majority , issued a rather more subtle and less thuggish but still unmistakable threat of widespread discontent among his many millions of supporters : That Sanders will arrive in Milwaukee with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ needless to say , far from guaranteed .
The Democratic establishment is rapidly snapping into line behind Biden like the sheep that they are , falling all over themselves to endorse him now that he won his first state in 30 years of running for president .
The establishment corporatist money that typically fuels the Democratic frontrunner — that had recently abandoned Biden as his campaigned looked to be in as much of acute collapse as his cognitive capacity — has very quickly reappeared now that he appears to be Sanders ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clear is that Sanders is currently the delegate leader and is almost certainly to be so by an even wider margin after all the votes are counted on Super Tuesday .
Far more importantly , the Democratic Party has already left no doubt that no matter what happens ultimately , they are fully prepared — with Warren ’ s active and eager help — to rely on a brokered convention to alter the will of the voters and impose the result they and their corporate donors and corporatist , militarist superdelegates want .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ years insisting that removing Trump from power is an absolute prerequisite to saving the republic and all things decent in the world , it is bizarre , to put it mildly , to watch them embark upon the one strategy that is most likely to most fracture their own party and drive huge numbers of voters away from their nominee .
They have an episode in their not-so-distant past — one that their elders who are plotting all of this obviously remember — which should serve as a very vibrant and compelling warning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to believe they are not aware of what they are doing .
Indeed , there ’ s every reason to believe they know exactly the harm this would cause .
That ’ s why the New York Times ’ headline reporting on this strategy made clear that the Democratic establishment was willing to risk another four years of Trump in order to prevent a takeover of “ their party ” by an actual advocate of the working class and a mild , incremental opponent of corporatism and militarism : Those are not the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump from power as its overarching priority .
Those are , instead , the actions of party establishment apparatchiks who far prefer to lose to Trump and endure four more years of his presidency than lose their monopoly over the apparatus of an out-of-power Democratic Party and all the consulting contracts , funding opportunities , and lobbyist openings that go along with it .
And that ’ s the reason why the destruction of the Democratic Party establishment remains , for so many , such an overarching political priority .
It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ progress is possible without first removing that rot .

Photo: AP
For four years, Democratic officials have insisted that Donald Trump is an unprecedented threat to the republic, a fascist and racist dictator whose removal from power is the paramount, if not the only, political priority. Yet the strategy on which they are now explicitly relying to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders from being their 2020 presidential nominee — a brokered convention at which party elites anoint a nominee other than the one who receives the most votes and wins the most delegates during the primary process — is the one most likely to ensure Trump’s reelection.
In the 1964 general election, the Democratic candidate, Lyndon Johnson, won the presidency in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history, with more than 60 percent of the popular vote and all but six states. Four years later, it all came crashing down for the Democrats, as the once-left-for-dead Republican, Richard Nixon, not only reversed the Democrats’ 1964 electoral gains, but also permanently obliterated many of their long-held regional strongholds, while winning an Electoral College landslide against the Democratic Party nominee, Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey; Nixon achieved this despite running against the third-party segregationist George Wallace, who swept five Southern states.
The results of the 1964 presidential election and the 1968 presidential election. Images: Tallicfan20 via Wikimedia Commons
A major factor in that jarring outcome, if not the dispositive one, was the Democratic Party convention that took place in Chicago in late August, just slightly more than two months prior to the election. The convention was a brokered one, marred by protests and riots outside the convention hall, and angry fights among delegates inside of it, that culminated in the anointing of the establishment candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, over the anti-war candidate of the left, Sen. Eugene McCarthy.
McCarthy had entered the primary on a platform of opposing the Democratic Party’s commitment to the Vietnam War under Johnson, who had intended to seek reelection and was widely viewed as the favorite to win. But the little-known Minnesota senator — driven at first by massive enthusiasm on the part of young anti-war voters — stunned Johnson by winning 42% of the vote and the bulk of the delegates in the New Hampshire primary, forcing the incumbent president to announce that he would not seek his party’s nomination.
The Democratic establishment, desperate over the anti-war sentiment overtaking the party, turned to Humphrey, as well as its arcane rules that allowed backroom deals to choose the nominee at the convention, in order to maintain its stranglehold over the party regardless of what the dirty masses of their voters thought or wanted.
Humphrey, knowing that he lacked grassroots support in the party, all but ignored the states with primaries, opting instead to compete for delegates only in the caucuses, which were controlled by party bosses. By the time they arrived at the Chicago convention, McCarthy had a huge lead over Humphrey in votes received, but none of the candidates had a majority of the committed delegates.
As the convention began, with anti-war and anti-Johnson protests growing outside, Johnson and Chicago Mayor and Democratic Party machine boss Richard J. Daley began maneuvering to ensure that delegates lined up behind Humphrey. As the party’s left-wing, anti-war activists began realizing that the party’s bosses were going to nominate a candidate who had relied overwhelmingly on establishment support, with very little grassroots approval, their anger grew. It reached a boiling point as the establishment bosses used their control over the rule-making process to defeat anti-war planks in the platform.
In response, Daley’s police force became increasingly repressive and violent against his party’s anti-war left. The Humphrey-supporting Chicago mayor was seen on national television using vulgar anti-Semitic slurs against the Jewish Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff after Ribicoff denounced Daley’s police for using what he called “Gestapo tactics” against the protesters, as well as dissident delegates inside the convention hall, and even network news journalists covering the increasingly ugly battles.
Photo: AP
That intense conflict, disunity, and intraparty strife completely consumed the Democratic Party convention, crippling the messaging and candidacy of Hubert Humphrey. To say that it spawned lingering resentment within the party and prevented unity heading into the general election is a massive understatement.
The millions of Democrats who had voted for McCarthy felt — with very good reason — that they had been undemocratically robbed by party bosses, led by Johnson and Daley, who had installed a pro-war, pro-establishment candidate by exploiting anti-democratic convention floor rules to subvert the anti-war, anti-establishment candidate who had received the most actual votes during the primary process.
The parallels to what the Democratic establishment is plotting to do to Sanders in 2020 is too obvious to require much elaboration. Party leaders, and all of the remaining major candidates — including Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and Elizabeth Warren — are making explicitly clear that the strategy on which they are relying is extremely similar to the one invoked by party bosses in 1968 to deny McCarthy the nomination. It is very difficult to understand why they would expect a different outcome.
Last Thursday, in an article notably entitled “Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders,” the New York Times reported that Democratic Party superdelegates were already plotting to deny Sanders the nomination even if he arrived in Milwaukee for the 2020 Democratic National Convention with the most votes and delegates but just shy of the majority needed to win on a first ballot. These party officials, said the Times, are “willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance” — by using tactics similar to those used by their 1968 predecessors to stop McCarthy and anoint Humphrey.
Photo: AP
Then there’s Elizabeth Warren, whose ongoing presence in the race — despite having no realistic chance to win by any metric — is confounding many people. But Warren’s campaign has made explicitly clear why she is remaining in the race: because she wants to prevent Sanders from securing a majority of delegates and thus force a brokered convention at which she can be chosen by party leaders and superdelegates — over the wishes of voters — to be the nominee.
On Saturday, the Massachusetts senator’s campaign proclaimed that “no candidate will likely have a path to the majority of delegates”— the classic self-fulfilling prophecy made far likelier by her ongoing siphoning of left-wing votes away from Sanders. Indeed, the New York Times reported late last week that party insiders were delighted by her ongoing refusal to drop out; they “hope she will stay in the race and complicate Mr. Sanders’s efforts to consolidate the left.” That her campaign is now being fueled by a richly funded super PAC whose dark-money donors at the moment remain anonymous, and whose support she refuses to renounce in direct violation of her repeated pledges, has only bolstered suspicions about the true function and purpose of her candidacy.
Warren’s campaign memo — as if it walked straight out of Richard Daley’s 1968 office — pronounced that “Milwaukee is the final play” where, despite obviously not having anything close to the most votes or delegates, she nonetheless intends to “ultimately prevail,” presumably through the smoke-filled backroom deals engineered by party bosses which she once pretended to disdain.
There’s another, more recent historical episode relevant here: the 2016 GOP primary, where Republican establishment leaders openly plotted to deny Trump the nomination if he arrived at the convention with a plurality but not a majority of delegates. In response, Trump threatened that his supporters would engage in violence, telling CNN: “I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous many, many millions of people.” He menacingly added: “I think bad things would happen, I really do.”
Sanders, when asked this weekend on ABC News what would happen if he were denied the nomination despite having the most votes and delegates but remaining short of a majority, issued a rather more subtle and less thuggish but still unmistakable threat of widespread discontent among his many millions of supporters:
https://twitter.com/ibrahimpols/status/1234179091152146433
That Sanders will arrive in Milwaukee with the most delegates and votes is, needless to say, far from guaranteed. The Democratic establishment is rapidly snapping into line behind Biden like the sheep that they are, falling all over themselves to endorse him now that he won his first state in 30 years of running for president. The establishment corporatist money that typically fuels the Democratic frontrunner — that had recently abandoned Biden as his campaigned looked to be in as much of acute collapse as his cognitive capacity — has very quickly reappeared now that he appears to be Sanders’s only credible rival.
But what is clear is that Sanders is currently the delegate leader and is almost certainly to be so by an even wider margin after all the votes are counted on Super Tuesday. Far more importantly, the Democratic Party has already left no doubt that no matter what happens ultimately, they are fully prepared — with Warren’s active and eager help — to rely on a brokered convention to alter the will of the voters and impose the result they and their corporate donors and corporatist, militarist superdelegates want.
For a party that has spent four years insisting that removing Trump from power is an absolute prerequisite to saving the republic and all things decent in the world, it is bizarre, to put it mildly, to watch them embark upon the one strategy that is most likely to most fracture their own party and drive huge numbers of voters away from their nominee. They have an episode in their not-so-distant past — one that their elders who are plotting all of this obviously remember — which should serve as a very vibrant and compelling warning against doing this.
It is hard to believe they are not aware of what they are doing. Indeed, there’s every reason to believe they know exactly the harm this would cause. That’s why the New York Times’ headline reporting on this strategy made clear that the Democratic establishment was willing to risk another four years of Trump in order to prevent a takeover of “their party” by an actual advocate of the working class and a mild, incremental opponent of corporatism and militarism:
The New York Times
Those are not the actions of a party that regards removing Trump from power as its overarching priority. Those are, instead, the actions of party establishment apparatchiks who far prefer to lose to Trump and endure four more years of his presidency than lose their monopoly over the apparatus of an out-of-power Democratic Party and all the consulting contracts, funding opportunities, and lobbyist openings that go along with it.
And that’s the reason why the destruction of the Democratic Party establishment remains, for so many, such an overarching political priority. It’s hard to see how any meaningful political progress is possible without first removing that rot.