The Intercept Briefing

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.

Jury selection for the murder trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin continues after the city announced a $27 million settlement with George Floyd’s family. This week on Intercepted: Organizer and educator Mariame Kaba talks to lead producer Jack D’Isidoro about the case, efforts born out of the uprisings of this past summer, and the role hope plays in building a long-term abolitionist movement. Whether she’s breaking down the historical foundations of the carceral state or laying out a framework for mutual aid, Kaba works tirelessly to reimagine and create a system not rooted in punishment and oppression. They also discuss her new book “We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Few anti-fascists were as influential on Portland’s recent protest scene as Sean Kealiher. He rarely missed a protest, and he would have been front and center last summer when the insurrectionary activism he had long advocated for became a staple on Portland streets. But he wasn’t. In October 2019, at 23, he was killed in front of the state Democratic Party building, which protesters vandalized on Inauguration Day this year. Kealiher’s death, which was ruled a homicide, shocked Portland’s activist community. But no arrests were ever made, and no persons of interest were ever named. Those in Kealiher’s circle saw his unsolved murder as further confirmation of the police’s double standards and antagonism toward the left.This week on Intercepted: While it was largely former President Donald Trump who elevated antifa, short for anti-fascists, to a household name, generations of Portland anti-fascists have for decades opposed far-right, racist extremists as well as police. Reporter Alice Speri dives into Kealiher’s ideology and murder, Portland’s legacy of anti-fascist activism and its deeply intertwined history of white supremacist violence, and how law enforcement’s obsession with antifa led to intelligence failures like U.S. Capitol riot. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As Joe Biden took the oath of office this January, Guatemalan security forces at the Honduran border thwarted thousands of U.S.-bound migrants. While decades-long American imperialism has facilitated displacement throughout the region, the U.S. is increasingly outsourcing its deadly immigration policy. This week on Intercepted: The Biden administration announced it will begin to process the 25,000 asylum seekers stuck in squalid border town camps as part of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. But immigration advocates fear President Biden will not reverse the bipartisan trend of his predecessors to further militarize the southern border and expand the reaches of immigration enforcement — policies that have led to more migrant deaths and detention in recent decades. Despite Biden’s executive actions to reverse the Muslim ban, initiate migrant family reunification, and fortify DACA, his administration has indicated that it will continue to support Mexican and Guatemalan armed enforcement of their borders on behalf of the U.S.TThe activist and writer Harsha Walia joins Intercepted to discuss the Democratic Party’s fundamental role in shaping the long arc of U.S. border policy and why the practice of “prevention through deterrence” will continue to incur more suffering and preventable deaths. She also presents an abolitionist view of a world without borders. Walia’s most recent book is “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A massive police database obtained by The Intercept provides groundbreaking insight into the pervasive surveillance state operated by the Chinese government to repress Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. This week on Intercepted: A new report from The Intercept provides a raw glimpse into the persecution and sweeping internment of Muslims in the city of Ürümqi, the largest city in northwest China’s Xinjiang region.The report also confirms many of the anti-democratic systems already in place: child separation and carceral re-education, installation of surveillance cameras inside private homes and mosques, immense detention centers, constant police checkpoints, widespread collection of electronic and biometric data, demolition of Uyghur cemeteries, and the forced abortion and sterilization of women.Although the United States has surveilled, abused, rendered, and imprisoned Muslims for decades, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that China is committing “ongoing” genocide. His successor, Antony Blinken, agreed with that characterization during his confirmation hearing in January.The Intercept’s Ryan Tate, technology reporter Yael Grauer, and anthropologist Darren Byler analyze the unprecedented scale and sophistication of the surveillance campaign detailed in the database. We also hear Uyghur linguist and poet Abduweli Ayup tell the story of his 15-month detainment for operating a Uyghur-language kindergarten in Xinjiang. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Now that Donald Trump is gone from office, what’s next? This week on Intercepted: There are a slew of unanswered questions about the siege of the Capitol. Americans are being asked to believe that the national security apparatus — the same one that charged nearly 200 people en masse, including journalists and observers, with felony rioting when Trump was inaugurated in 2017, and has leveled federal charges including terrorism charges on Black Lives Matter protesters — failed to see the threat to the U.S. Congress posed by right-wing extremists, even as people organized across social media platforms in plain sight.In response to the Capitol siege, Joe Biden and some members of Congress are looking to expand new domestic terrorism laws. They are using the exact same playbook deployed by the Bush-Cheney White House after 9/11 and embraced across the aisles in Congress. This is a dangerous moment where policies with very serious implications could be rushed through in the heat of the moment.The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux, Ken Klippenstein, Alice Speri, Natasha Lennard, Sam Biddle, Mara Hvistendahl, and Murtaza Hussain share their thoughts on the transition of power from Trump to Biden that is happening today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special bonus episode of Intercepted, we take an in-depth look at one of the most consequential eras of modern history, the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, as the Soviet Union crumbled. The Russian occupation of Afghanistan came to an end, thanks in no small part to the covert and overt involvement of the United States. Bill Clinton brought an end to 12 years of Republican rule, defeating the former CIA director George HW Bush. And with Clinton’s two terms in office came a new spin on US militarism across the world, the notion of liberal so-called humanitarian intervention. The propaganda pitch was that the United States would use its military force as a sort of global police officer whose violent actions were wrapped in the justification that US missiles and bombs and troop deployments were serving a greater good. Nowhere was this more boldly asserted than in the wars in Yugoslavia, which stretched from the early 1990s all the way through 2008 when the US officially recognized the independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo. The years that ushered in the declaration of the end of the Cold War would have a significant impact on global relations and warmaking to this day. University of Chicago scholar Daryl Li has written a meticulously documented book that seeks to understand the trends that emerged from this era, with a focus on putting into context the movement of foreign fighters from country to country. The book is called “The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity.” Li highlights the parallels between transnational jihadists, UN peacekeeping missions and socialist non-alignment and he examines the relationship between jihad and US empire. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.