The Intercept Briefing

For more than six months, The Intercept’s Trevor Aaronson communicated with Russell Dennison, an American man who traveled to Syria and joined the Islamic State. This week on Intercepted: Aaronson, an investigative reporter, discusses American ISIS, the newest Audible Original podcast documentary from The Intercept and Topic Studios, in which he chronicles the story of Russell Dennison, one of the first American citizens to join ISIS and fight with the group in Syria. Almost daily, Dennison communicated with Aaronson, sending him hours of audio chronicling his conversion to Islam, his turn to extremism, and his journey to Syria. Aaronson talks with Intercept reporter Murtaza Hussain about his reporting and what he learned from Dennison. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Water protectors are traveling in growing numbers to stand with the Anishinaabe-led movement to stop the construction of Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline.This week on Intercepted: Intercept reporter Alleen Brown takes us to northern Minnesota, a flashpoint in the fight to halt the expansion of the fossil fuel industry as the climate crisis deepens. Direct actions and other protests against Line 3 are just heating up and more than 500 people have already been arrested or issued citations. Opponents of the Line 3 pipeline are urging the Biden administration to intervene to stop construction, but his administration recently moved to defend the pipeline. Water protectors are being greeted by an intensifying police response and what scholars are calling a corporate counterinsurgency campaign led by the pipeline company, Enbridge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Domestic workers — nannies, house cleaners, and care workers — are one of the fastest-growing labor groups in the U.S. They are also some of the most undervalued and least-protected workers, a factor further exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.This week on Intercepted: Vanessa Bee and Murtaza Hussain interview Ai-jen Poo, co-founder and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, about the impact of Covid-19 on these vulnerable yet essential workers. They also discuss how the exclusion of labor protections for domestic workers has roots in slavery and how President Joe Biden’s jobs plan could ensure historically denied rights. And we hear stories from domestic workers themselves as they organize for their rights on International Domestic Workers Day in New York City. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation uncovered a mass grave of 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia, Canada. This week on Intercepted: Naomi Klein speaks with residential school survivor Doreen Manuel and her niece Kanahus Manuel about the horrors of residential schools and the relationship between stolen children and stolen land. Doreen’s father, George Manuel, was a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, where unmarked graves of children as young as 3 years old were found. Kanahus’s father, Arthur Manuel, was also a survivor of the Kamloops residential school. This intergenerational conversation goes deep on how the evils of the Kamloops school, and others like it, have reverberated through a century of Manuels, an experience shared by so many Indigenous families, and the Manuel family’s decades long fight to reclaim stolen land.Warning: This episode contains highly distressing details about the killing, rape, and torture of children. If you are a survivor and need to talk, there is contact information in the show notes. If you are a former residential school student in distress, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419Additional mental-health support and resources for Indigenous people are available here.  Show notes:Doreen Manuel can be found @DoreenManuel1 and www.runningwolf.ca Kanahus can be found at @kanahusfreedom and www.tinyhousewarriors.com“Unsettling Canada: A National Wake Up Call,” by Arthur Manuel“The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy,” by Arthur Manuel“From Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement,” by Peter McFarlane with Doreen Manuel, afterword by Kanahus Manuel“The Fourth World: An Indian Reality,” by George Manuel and Michael Posluns“These Walls” directed by Doreen Manuel Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When a police officer shoots and kills someone — and there aren’t any witnesses — can we trust the police to investigate themselves?This week on Intercepted: Antoine and Tammy Bufford's son, Cortez, was shot and killed by a St. Louis police officer in 2019. Nearly two years later, the city is still investigating Cortez’s case. No charges have been filed. And the Bufford family is still looking for answers. The police kill more people per capita in St. Louis than in any other American city. Seventy-two percent of these people are Black, like Cortez.The Chicago-based Invisible Institute recently partnered with The Intercept to examine the circumstances of Cortez’s death. Their resulting investigation, reported by Alison Flowers and Sam Stecklow, sheds new light in the search for truth about this police killing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the year since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the mass mobilization of protest that followed — the largest collective gesture against police violence in this country’s history — there’s been a constant and energized call to defund or outright abolish policing as we know it in the U.S. This week on Intercepted: The U.S. has been grappling with this same cycle of violence for more than nearly a century: A Black person is killed by police, and protests follow. In 1968, the U.S. tried to find out why this kept happening in cities and small towns across the country with an unprecedented frequency. President Lyndon B. Johnson assembled the Kerner Commission to study the extraordinary violence and destruction of uprisings in cities like Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit the year prior. Their findings should surprise no one. Systemic and institutionalized racism was to blame. Structural white supremacy maintained two societies: “One Black, one white. Separate and unequal.”Historian Elizabeth Hinton, author of “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s,” argues that protestors were not rioters but rather political participants in rebellion against their own poverty, inequality, and constant surveillance and brutality by the police. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A week ago, the Biden administration announced support for waiving intellectual property protection for Covid-19 vaccines. In response, Bio, a trade association representing biotechnology companies, issued a statement saying, "The United States has unfortunately chosen to set a dangerous precedent with these actions.” This week on Intercepted: Intercept investigative journalists Sharon Lerner and Lee Fang discuss how the pharmaceutical industry has ruthlessly fought to maintain IP protection from the beginning of the pandemic despite global calls to share knowledge and know-how to end the crisis as quickly as possible. By claiming the same monopoly IP rights on Covid-19 therapeutics and vaccines as other drugs, the industry has perpetuated a market of scarcity and profiteering when a collaborative global response is needed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you went back and looked at every foreign policy decision Joe Biden made — every single one — would you be any closer to understanding him? This week on Intercepted: Our editor-at-large and senior correspondent Jeremy Scahill and reporter Murtaza Hussain examined the past 50 years of Biden’s decisions, poring over hundreds of pages of archival copies of the congressional record and reviewing declassified CIA documents for mentions of Biden. The investigation is called “Empire Politician,” and it’s the result of this painstaking research into Biden’s historical record. Jeremy and Murtaza also analyze Biden’s recent pledge to withdraw forces from Afghanistan by September this year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

While much of the public’s attention has been focused on the thousands of unaccompanied minors currently in U.S. custody, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has quietly begun a policy of dropping off asylum-seekers in remote border towns along the deadliest stretches of the U.S.-Mexico divide.This week on Intercepted: Intercept reporter Ryan Devereaux travels to the Arizona cities of Ajo and Tucson, speaking to migrants and local volunteers about the dangers and uncertainty people are facing. Devereaux investigates how the Biden administration’s continuation of Trump-era policies like Title 42, which has been used to expel more than half a million migrants in the past year, jeopardizes the safety of asylum-seekers and exacerbates the humanitarian crisis at the border. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration invited companies to retroactively amend emissions records of a deadly carcinogenic chemical. This week on Intercepted: Investigative reporter Sharon Lerner explains how 270,000 pounds of the chemical ethylene oxide vanished from the public record right after the EPA determined that it was more toxic than previously known. Ethylene oxide is a colorless and odorless gas used to produce many consumer goods and used extensively as an agent in the sterilization of medical equipment.Despite the EPA’s transition to new leadership under the Biden administration, regulatory capture is a persistent obstacle in the agency’s ability to protect public health and the environment. And as Lerner reports, a disproportionate number of poor communities and communities of color have yet to be alerted to the fact that elevated levels of cancer-causing ethylene oxide permeate the air they breathe. We also hear from a group of Texas women that believes their breast cancer diagnoses are linked to exposure to the chemical. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.