‘Human Error’ At Baltimore Facility Ruined Millions of Johnson & Johnson Vaccine

The Daily Beast

Antony Blinken Demolishes Mike Pompeo’s Twisted Human Rights Approach

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/GettyThe beat-down that Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered this week to his predecessor Mike Pompeo was so severe that it might have to be included in next year’s State Department Human Rights report. As it happens, Blinken’s explicit and implicit critique of his predecessor came in conjunction with the release of this year’s edition of the State Department rundown of human rights abuses worldwide.The report itself was largely compiled by the State Department in the last days of Pompeo’s tenure. But adjustments made by the Blinken team, the way Joe Biden’s secretary of state framed the actions and attitudes of Pompeo, and key steps taken to undo some of the damage done by Donald Trump’s chief diplomat were brutal in their directness. As it happens they were also warranted, delivered in a way that made it absolutely clear that American foreign policy was once again going to be guided by our national interests and shared values and not by the political ambitions of Pompeo or the extreme views of the right-wing evangelical faction to which he catered.The Trump administration’s gross mishandling of issues associated with human rights both at home and abroad has become one of the worst stains on its record. At home, it systematically attacked freedom of speech and of the press and undermined the right to assemble and protest, as well as the right to vote and the right to equal protection under the law. There were numerous calls for Trump to be brought before the International Criminal Court to answer for human rights abuses against immigrants at our border. And of course, by the time Trump left office he had actually launched an all-out assault on democracy itself, the right of a people to self-determination that had been the reason the United States was founded in the first place.Joe Biden’s National Security Picks Are the Best in DecadesInternationally, Trump celebrated and defended human rights violators like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Russian President Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jingping, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and many others. The Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the U.N. Human Rights Council. It imposed asset freezes and other sanctions on prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC)—a move that Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch’s international justice programme, called “perverse” and which, he said, only “magnifies the failure of the U.S. to prosecute torture.”In 2018, Pompeo’s State Department eliminated mentions from the human rights report of abuses associated with reproductive health. At the time, Planned Parenthood issued a statement saying, “By erasing reproductive rights from the State Department’s human rights report, the United States is demoting women’s rights to something…