DL Open Thread: Monday, August 16, 2021

Yo, Joe, Stop This Pipeline Now.  They voted for you.  The filthiest oil in the United States, headed here ‘courtesy’ of a Canadian corporation, will soon flow through Indigenous lands if you allow this.  5 billion gallons of water diverted,  760,000 barrels of crude per day to flow through across 14 counties in northern Minnesota.  Was the appointing of an Indigenous Secretary of the Interior just for show? Sure looks like it:

Indigenous and environmental activists say the pipeline not only poses a grave risk to Minnesota’s environment but hinders the state’s transition to clean energy and violates the long-held treaty rights of Native tribes that depend on the land for their cultural identities and livelihood.

More than 700 demonstrators have been arrested this summer during acts of civil disobedience, according to the Pipeline Legal Action Network, an organization that coordinates legal support for Line 3 protesters. Those acts include incidents where protesters chained themselves to drills, climbed inside sections of pipe still waiting to be laid in the ground and blocked access to construction sites by hosting Indigenous ceremonies in the middle of roads used by Enbridge workers.

But as activists dug in their heels, they were met by equally increasing hostility from police, who say they’re simply carrying out the laws that have been put in place by the state’s elected officials and top regulators.

In June, protesters accused police of using a low-flying helicopter as a form of intimidation. In July, several demonstrators were sprayed with chemical irritants and shot with rubber bullets by law enforcement after the activists scaled a fence meant to keep people out of an Enbridge construction site. And last week, one demonstrator was reportedly knocked unconscious by police in Pennington County during a trespassing arrest, according to a social media post. The video on the social post showed the young activist being aggressively pulled to the ground by officers.

Yo, Joe, or any of his officials–Please read this paragraph:

Many had hoped the Biden administration would intervene, as it did with the Keystone XL pipeline in January. Those hopes were dashed after the Department of Justice filed a legal brief in late June that defended the project.

Biden’s Justice Department is defending the despoiling of Indigenous lands in Minnesota.  Just thought you’d like to know.

Everybody Knew That Kabul Would Fall, Going Back At Least A Decade. They just didn’t tell us. Yet, we stayed.  To what purpose?:

In fact, according to documents obtained for the forthcoming Washington Post book “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” U.S. military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on U.S. money and firepower. “Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an unnamed former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2016.

Those fears, rarely expressed in public, were ultimately borne out by the sudden collapse this month of the Afghan security forces, whose wholesale and unconditional surrender to the Taliban will go down as perhaps the worst debacle in the history of proxy warfare.