La Jicarita

On August 11, a quorum of the Questa City Council, minus the absent Mayor John Ortego, called for a special meeting within 72 hours to address Kit Carson Electric Cooperative’s proposed hydrogen plant and solar array. Mayor Ortega, an employee of KCEC, has been accused of approving the hydrogen project, and the funding to support it, without oversight or approval of the City Council. Council members had been trying for months to get the project on the agenda and to meet with KCEC without support from the mayor.

Work on the project has been ongoing despite the fact that the Council doesn’t know if a proper County work permit has been issued and has never seen the United States Department of Agriculture’s application that supports the project (a FOIA request for all pertinent USDA information has been submitted). The Council never approved the $20 million that funds the solar array, where work has also begun. At one point Councilor Daryl Ortega, after questioning how the Questa city attorneys had failed to ascertain if KCEC had obtained a permit for the project, announced in frustration: “Without a permit this project needs to be shut down!” The crowd erupted in applause.

When the meeting was opened for public comment, Honorio Justin Rael, the law school student and Questa native who wrote the complaint filed by Questa acequias against the USDA’s approval of the hydrogen project, had this to say:

[T]onight I want to talk about some internal controls based on my 11,000-page IPRA [Inspection of Public Records]. So I reviewed the entire thing, and one thing has become crystal clear to me about the Village of Questa.

The people who make decisions for this town do not sit on that board. It is the Questa Economic Development Fund. The Questa Economic Development Fund is an independent Chevron-funded nonprofit partner, but they are not an elected governing body.

Yet their agendas are probably four times the size of any agenda I’ve seen from this village. And you know how we’ve never gotten any updates on what’s going on with this project? Well, they get monthly detailed updates from the mayor. Last year, they made teams to complete the zoning ordinance that allowed this project to move forward without a project-specific vote.

They made a team to develop a communication strategy concerning the project using the Questa del Rio News. And they’ve discussed ways that village meetings can be controlled to limit public backlash. The point being that an advisory board has been formulating zoning, public communications, lobbying grants, major financing strategies, and the public access to its own government with basically zero input from the village council.

The $20 million grant makes this problem concrete. Now, I’ve never heard of this, but on February 1st, the mayor submitted an ECAM [Energy Conservation and Management] grant on behalf of the Village of Questa. He requested approximately $35.2 million. And the application stated that the public funding would be used exclusively for infrastructure owned by KCEC. Then the people funding the grant, ENMRD, notified the mayor that Questa had received a reduced partial $20 million award. Kit Carson then told the mayor, quote, seems you only have to approve that you accept this partial $20 million and then we are good to go. All the other steps are the standard contracting that we can work through.

Kit Carson treated the acceptance of a $20 million grant as something that the mayor could approve alone, after which Kit Carson would handle the rest. Was there a resolution approving this application or accepting the award? No.

Now, who will own the infrastructure? Nobody knows. Who is responsible for compliance, repayment, or a potential claw-back? I’m asking you to put some guardrails on the Questa Economic Development Fund. Make it clear to them that they can advise and assist, but they may not represent the village, formulate final policy, or commit village resources without council authority.

La Jicarita will let readers know when the Questa City Council special meeting will be held once it’s determined.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By KAY MATTHEWS

There’s good news for the many Questa area citizens opposed to the proposed Kit Carson Electric Cooperative hydrogen facility and solar array. Attorneys for the Cabresto Lake Irrigation Community Ditch Association and Acequia Madre del Cerro de Guadalupe filed suit against the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Utilities Service over the agency’s Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) authorizing the Questa Hydrogen Project. Claiming that the ruling violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the notice seeks judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) and requests that a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be conducted rather than the inadequate Environmental Assessment (EA). The plaintiffs also allege that the EA improperly limited the scope of the environmental review by excluding the proposed solar array from analysis.

Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, Inc. (“KCEC”) proposes to construct and operate a hydrogen-production facility, an associated electrical substation, and a solar-generation facility in the Village of Questa, New Mexico. The proposed hydrogen facility and related infrastructure are located on property associated with the former Questa Mine Tailings Site and within or adjacent to areas subject to ongoing environmental remediation and oversight under the federal Superfund program. The Project would use electricity generated by the proposed solar facility to support the production of hydrogen. The hydrogen facility, electrical substation, solar facility, and related infrastructure are intended to function together as components of the same overall development. The Project plans the use of groundwater from an existing well owned by Chevron mining identified as RG-14117 POD 18 (“POD 18”). At present, POD 18 is authorized for water use associated with reclamation and dust-control activities at the mine and tailings facility.

The two acequia plaintiffs, Cerro Acequia, which diverts water from Cabresto Lake, and Acequia Madre, which diverts water from Latir Creek and contributing streams, supply irrigation water for hundreds of parciantes and allege that USDA approved the Project without complying with NEPA’s procedural requirements by preparing an inadequate EA and failing to take the required hard look at significant environmental consequences.

Operation of the Project requires the continued withdrawal and destruction of substantial quantities of groundwater, including approximately 10,579 gallons per hour, from a well located within the Chevron Questa Mine Superfund Site. Once the water is introduced into the electrolyzer, it undergoes destruction as water and dissociates into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. The liquid water pumped from the ground no longer exists. The EA concluded that groundwater resources would not be affected but did not support that conclusion with a quantified analysis of the Project’s anticipated withdrawals. The EA did not include an aquifer-drawdown analysis, long-term water analysis, or other adequate assessment of how sustained Project pumping could affect groundwater levels, nearby wells, connected surface-water resources, or water historically available to Plaintiffs and their members.

The suit also raises the issue of KCEC’s lease of the Chevron mine. At the time USDA issued the EA and the FONSI, KCEC was “currently in the process of purchasing the land described from Chevron for the construction of the proposed project.” On May 8, 2026, five months after issuance of the EA and the FONSI, KCEC and Chevron entered into a 3-year lease for the property. The lease, with a term of 3 years without renewal provisions, addresses ownership and use of the property, the presence of contaminated materials, responsibility for damage to the existing environmental remedy, and the allocation of environmental risks. Because the lease postdated the FONSI, USDA did not evaluate the final lease terms before making its NEPA determination, including the terms governing the duration of KCEC’s site control, ownership of permanent Project infrastructure, groundwater limitations, and responsibility for environmental conditions caused or aggravated by project activities.

After KCEC and Chevron executed the lease, USDA did not reopen its environmental review, prepare a supplemental environmental assessment, or issue a new finding addressing the final lease terms. USDA therefore did not evaluate whether the executed lease altered or undermined assumptions concerning KCEC’s long-term control of the Project site, ownership of permanent infrastructure, authority to use groundwater, responsibility for environmental damage, or interaction with the existing environmental remedy.

Furthermore, hydrogen gas production poses the risk of explosion. Upon completion and operation, the Project will store up to 29 tons of produced hydrogen gas under pressure in 54 tanks, with 28 tanks situated south of the 42 electrolyzer units and 26 tanks situated north of the 42 electrolyzer units. While KCEC contracted with Entrust Solutions to conduct a “What If” assessment, using 79 scenarios to evaluate risk and likely consequences of a variety of hypothetical failures of key components across the hydrogen storage, electrolyzer, and fuel cell units, an explosion can occur without the ignition of hydrogen.

Because construction is currently ongoing the Plaintiffs request immediate conjunctive relief. For more information you can go to the Questa Watershed Protectors Facebook page where the attorney who filed the complaint in US District Court in Albuquerque, Guy Dicharry, thanks Honorio Justin Rael who has done most of the legal work on this case.

file:///Users/geographer/Downloads/FILED%20COMPLAINT%20(1).pdf

By KAY MATTHEWS

I was at the library to pick up a book on hold when I checked out the new books. There on the shelf was Hated By All The Right People: Tucker Carson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. As we’ve all seen on social media, Carlson’s recent admission that there was a genocide in Gaza and his outspoken opposition to the war in Iran, are omnipresent. I picked up the book, figuring I’d browse through and get a sense of how author Jason Zengerle, a journalist with the New York Times, was going to treat this controversial public figure’s influence on the zeitgeist.

The book ends, in 2025, just as Carlson is beginning to question, and sometimes apologize for, his defense of Israel in Gaza and of the country in general. While the timing isn’t right for the author to speculate about just how much these flip-flops are politically motivated or “of the heart,” it isn’t hard for the reader to speculate on that motivation, as the book is, as Zengerle says in the Introduction, “the larger story of conservative politics and conservative media over the last thirty years” that resulted in the rise of MAGA. I ended up reading the whole damn book.

We begin in 1995 at the Weekly Standard with Bill Kristol, the newly minted editor from academia and son of Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism.” His partner at the magazine is John Pomerantz, former editor of the Washington Times and son of Norman, longtime editor of Commentary. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch gives them seed money of $3 million to be the magazine of choice in Washington D.C. Fox News won’t come alive until 1996.

It was an auspicious entry for a 26-year-old neophyte journalist, but Carlson’s politics pretty much aligned with the Weekly Standard’s; a prep school boy whose father was also a conservative heavy weight. Names we still see today in journalism got their start along with Carlson: David Brooks (NYT); David Frum (Atlantic); and Matt Labash (Substack). Despite his lack of experience, according to Zengerle, Carlson wrote “some excellent and entertaining journalism.” He profiled many of the 90s leading political figures—Ross Perot, Jack Kemp, James Carville, and Al Gore—usually in rather withering prose. He took on Newt Gingrich, who the paper initially supported but then saw as “feckless” and timid. Carlson also took on Grover Norquist (the Standard let him publish it in The New Republic) as a “cash-addled, morally malleable lobbyist.” He became known in Washington as a “different kind of conservative journalist,” although his stand against abortion was lock tight.

Maybe if Carlson had remained a magazine or newspaper reporter he’d have avoided the ultra-right pull of the MAGA movement (Frum and Brooks just became hackneyed conservatives but Labash is a MAGA). He had a short stint at Tina Brown’s Talk, profiling George W. Bush, who he deemed unfit for office, and always aspired to be like his idols—Hunter Thompson, George Plimpton, and A.J Liebling—but they were from a different era and this era was soon to become the internet and cable news, where Carlson landed as a talking head. Through sheer luck (he was the only one in the Standard office when CBS came calling) he appeared on CBS’s prime-time news show 48 Hours to talk about the O.J. Simpson trial.  CNN then came calling during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. While Carlson continued his job at the Standard, whose other reporters often mocked him for his television work, it was clear he was rising in the talking heads world. The Standard saw they were losing him and offered to reduce his workload by half if he’d stay, but CNN offered him his own show, The Spin Room, with cohost Bill Press, the former left-leaning chair on Crossfire. Rupert Murdoch put the kibosh on Carson working for both the Standard and his competitor, CNN. While The Spin Room didn’t last long, Carlson got promoted anyway to Crossfire, the longtime political debate show between the right and left.

He was in his element at Crossfire, or as Zengerle put it, “Carlson wasn’t merely a pundit; he was the host of Washington’s most exclusive cocktail party.” But, as in all things political, after a skewering by the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart CNN fired Carlson and cancelled Crossfire. He rebounded to MSNBC where he hosted The Situation with Tucker Carlson and spared with Rachel Maddow until that show, too, was canceled.

But it was his venture into website news, The Daily Caller, that was a real turning point for Carlson. At the beginning, Carlson felt the website could embody what he said at the CPAC meeting in 2009 where Rush Limbaugh was the keynote speaker: The conservative media was struggling because it “refused to put accuracy first” and instead prioritized bombast and opinion. Despite Tucker’s truth-telling as a bonafide journalist, The Daily Caller was, unfortunately, anything but. Once The Drudge Report, a hard-right website, and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News became its main competitors, the Caller’s relentless quest for  “hits” turned it into another media full of “bombast and opinion.” While he had hired respectable journalists at the Calling, he ended up hiring others who promoted white nationalism and racism.

Fox News was then in its ascendancy, and while Carlson initially took a condescending view—he dismissed its biggest star, Bill O’Reilly, as a “thin-skilled blowhard”—he recognized its hard right ideological success. Because of his reputation as a fairly open-minded TV host with a good sense of humor, author Zengerle has this to say about his role at Fox News: “He became a partisan shill.”

 Carlson was hired at Fox News while still at the Daily Caller, and his ascendency was slow. Zengerle provides a brief history of the development of Fox News under Roger Ailes and its relentless right turn during the Obama administration, with Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly leading the way. Once Trump announced in 2014 that he would run for president, Ailes saw immediately that he was “good for Fox News ratings” (Rupert Murdoch was not so convinced).

Until Trump’s presidential run Carlson was by no means a fan. But during his years at Daily Caller he’d “seen the web-traffic metrics” about where the conservative base was heading and “how a populist candidate who explicitly ran on nativism, white grievance, and sexism might have a lane in a Republican primary.” Five days before the election Fox News announced its new 7:00 pm show: Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

The last section of Zengerle’s book analyzes Carlson’s relationship with Trump over his two administrations. The first, in which Carlson “kept a wary personal and professional distance from the president” while the president watched his show every night and often called him afterwards to discuss it, led to Carlson’s planning his show with an eye towards influencing the president. While he actually became a moderating influence on aggressive foreign policy, he was steered right, both politically and culturally by a group called the NatCons, or national conservatives, born of think tanks like the Claremont Institute that “were either attempting to add intellectual heft to Trumpism or trying to reverse engineer an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s lizard brain populism.” In July 2020, Tucker Carson Tonight became the highest-rated program in US cable news history.

During the presidential interregnum Carlson kept his options open, flip-flopping on the January 6, 2020 storming of the Capitol from condemnation to “a mob of older people from unfashionable zip codes” and anchoring Fox News investigative long-form documentaries. He also befriended J.D. Vance in his rise to power and advocated for his senate run. Then, abruptly, in 2023, Fox News fired Carlson with no explanation. He had plenty of offers—one from Elon Musk—but by this time “the world was his oyster” and with billionaires stepping up he quickly formed his new digital-media company, the Tucker Carlson Network. This is where he whole-heartedly endorsed Trump’s second run and this time, he was the one to call Trump on the phone. He supported Vance for vice-president, helped persuade Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to not split the ticket, and was now an inside man.

Tucker Carlson Network is where we also hear him pontificating on anti-immigration and abortion while decrying the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s Iran war. I think most left-leaning pundits remain skeptical of his motivations but certainly welcome the anti-Zionist position he now promotes (although it’s more like pro-Christianity anti-Zionism). It may move us closer to the end of MAGA, but the tragedy is the damage already done. And for that, maybe Carlson will be remembered as being hated by everyone.

Editor’s Note: This article was published by Colorado Newsline, reprinted with permission through Creative Commons.

Feds to impose new cuts on lower Colorado River states amid climate-fueled megadrought ByChase Woodruff–July 31, 2026 2:26 pm Glen Canyon Dam holds back the waters of Lake Powell near Page, Arizona, on Feb. 2, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)

The federal government on Friday formalized a set of guidelines for managing water use in the Colorado River Basin over the next decade, if Colorado and six other Western states can’t come to an agreement on how to deal with declining flows caused in large part by climate change.

“The Department has a responsibility to ensure the Colorado River system remains reliable and resilient for the millions of Americans, communities and industries that depend on it,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a press release. “This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions.”

Under the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s “preferred alternative” for the management of the river’s reservoir system, outlined in a extensive environmental impact statement, the burden of the most severe cuts would continue to fall on the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, which could face mandatory cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet of water. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming would face only voluntary conservation targets totaling 200,000 acre-feet.

All seven states were parties to the Colorado River Compact, a 1922 agreement governing the use of water from the vital Western watershed. Today, the Colorado River provides water to an area inhabited by 40 million people across the Southwest, though agricultural uses account for the vast majority of consumption.

Since 2000, a megadrought caused largely by global warming — the region’s worst dry spell in at least 1,200 years — has stressed water supplies across the basin and pushed the Colorado River Compact to a breaking point. The last set of federal guidelines to address shortages, issued nearly 20 years ago, will expire Jan. 1, and the seven Colorado River Compact states failed to reach a new agreement before a federally imposed deadline in February.

A map of the Colorado River Basin system. (U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The combined amount of water stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the Colorado River system’s two key reservoirs, fell this month to its lowest level since May 1957 — before Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam, had even begun to fill.

Without a major turnaround in hydrologic conditions in the near future, water levels in Lake Powell are expected to fall by next spring to below “minimum power pool,” at which point the Glen Canyon Dam’s hydroelectric turbines would be unable to operate.

Negotiations over a comprehensive new agreement have led to an increasingly bitter dispute between the Upper Basin states — led by Colorado, the river’s headwaters state and by far the Upper Basin’s largest water user — and the Lower Basin states, especially Arizona, which has borne the brunt of the cuts imposed in recent years. Arizona is widely expected to launch a high-stakes legal challenge as soon as this summer, alleging Colorado and other Upper Basin states are failing to meet an obligation under the original Colorado River Compact to allow enough water to flow downstream.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued a joint statement Friday with the governors of the other three Upper Basin states, saying that “both the Upper and Lower divisions of the basin are feeling the pain of severe drought,” and that they were “committed to continued good-faith discussions with our counterparts.”

“Many hours of meetings and negotiations took place between the Colorado River Basin states and these discussions will continue,” the statement said. “Today’s framework does not represent a final solution, but enables the River to be managed in the short-term while the seven states and (the Interior Department) continue to negotiate a consensus solution.”

In the absence of a new agreement among the states, the Bureau of Reclamation says it will continue to update its new guidelines every two years until 2036.

Andrea Travnicek, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science, said the plan “strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability … given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users.”

In a statement, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said he was “disappointed” by the failure to reach a new long-term agreement among the seven Colorado River Compact states.

“While a two-year operating plan is the bare minimum needed to operate the river, a long-term, consensus agreement that recognizes real hydrologic conditions is the only durable solution to bring certainty to the Colorado River,” Bennet said.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 3:47 p.m., July 31, 2026, to include a joint statement from Upper Basin governors.

Opinion By KAY MATTHEWS

The article in the July 25 New Mexican, “U.S. defense bill would accelerate plutonium pit production, with possible increase at LANL,” states that “All three New Mexico representatives voted against the defense bill, which has become a flashpoint over the war in Iran. Only six Democrats in the House voted for the bill. Members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Friday about the plutonium pit provision.”

The New Mexico delegation voted against the bill because it ignores the resolution they voted for to stop funding the Iran War and because the bill included Section 219 that combines or “integrates” the Israeli military with the U.S. military, compromising U.S. sovereignty. The bill awards $1.5 trillion to the Defense Department, a 60 percent increase. Kudos for them for the negative vote.

But they wouldn’t respond to the question about the plutonium pit production because, to my knowledge, no New Mexico congressional member has ever questioned, or god forbid, opposed pit production at LANL. I often refer to Pete Domenici, New Mexico Senator from 1973 to 2009, as LANL’s biggest cheerleader. Apparently, his nickname was “Saint Pete” among staff and reporters.  He chaired the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Energy Committee and made sure funding made its consistent way to LANL.

But Domenici served before the decision to change LANL from a research lab to a pit production lab. That credit goes to the entire New Mexico delegation back in 2017— Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich and Representatives Michelle Lujan Grisham and Ben Ray Lujan. When the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was doing an initial assessment about how to restart the production of pits after the closure of Rocky Flats, the only pit production facility, the agency initially gave LANL a negative assessment. Udall, Heinrich, and Lujan wrote a letter to NNSA claiming the assessment was flawed and that LANL was the appropriate lab for pit production. Lujan, on the Armed Services Committee, put language in the defense bill that LANL would produce 30 pits per year, with surge capacity beyond that. When NNSA ultimately decided on a two-site plan of LANL and Savannah River, in South Carolina, all the of delegation, including Lujan Grisham, objected to NNSA halting the long-planned modular expansion of LANL’s facilities and urged it to abandon the Savannah River option in favor of investing fully in LANL’s modular facilities as originally endorsed by both Congress and the Nuclear Weapons Council.

The only time I know that a New Mexico congress person spoke up about LANL’s weapon mission was when Tom Udall, then a New Mexico representative running for Senator Pete Domenici’s seat, was criticized for voting for a reduction in weapons-related funding for LANL. Seventy percent of LANL’s budget was then spent on “core nuclear weapons research and production programs.” Udall called for diversified mission at the Lab that included “renewable” energy programs, for which the House had recently allocated an additional $638 million to the energy budget for renewable energy research and production at LANL. But then Tom got elected Senator and joined the chorus of unlimited funding for weapon production at LANL.

In the March 2025 issue of La Jicarita, Suzie Schwartz interrogated the February LANL release of its Economic Impact Study, where it painted a rosy picture of all its economic development initiatives and programs that help stimulate business growth and create jobs. Ironically, the results of a previous study by the University of New Mexico Bureau of Business and Economic Research, commissioned by LANL to show the lab’s economic impact on northern New Mexico, contains data demonstrating the Lab had a negative fiscal impact on Santa Fe, Taos, and especially Rio Arriba County. LANL requested those statistics be removed from the final study.

Both National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews of projects that will determine the extent of  pit production, the Site-wide Environmental Impact Statement for LANL and the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for both LANL and Savannah River, have received overwhelming opposition from New Mexicans. At all the public hearings for both projects, those who commented were opposed to new pit production and the escalating nuclear arms race that the Trump administration is pursuing. When will the New Mexico congressional delegation, all Democrats, stand up in support of their constituents? The rationale of LANL as the economic engine of New Mexico is a lie and the congressional delegation’s support of endless funding for LANL is revelatory of its complicity in that lie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By TANIA ZIVKOVICH

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya remains in prison in the hell of Israeli detention since his arrest in late 2024. He is on the verge of death from beatings, torture, and starvation. He has never been charged with a crime, like the thousands of others who languish in prison. But in the twisted mind of the Israeli occupation forces, he is a dangerous criminal. His real crime—he’s a doctor, a highly respected and beloved pediatrician, director of Kamal Adwan Children’s Hospital in Gaza.

That really says it all. To the sado-fascist Netanyahu regime, health care workers, aid workers, and educators are all high on their list of enemies to be destroyed. They are often killed in targeted assassinations and frequently bombed at home with their families in the Israeli AI assassination program “Where’s Daddy.”

Dr. Abu Safiya was taken in a raid on his hospital. His family was among many others, sheltering on hospital grounds. Shortly before his arrest, his young son Ibrahim was killed there in an Israeli airstrike. The doctor had also suffered serious leg injuries and been previously arrested, along with staff and patients. That time, all were taken outside, stripped naked, bound, and beaten. He was released as the others were taken away. At the time of the raid when he was arrested he was offered the option of remaining at the hospital. But he refused, saying I am standing with my detained colleagues. When the soldiers brought him to the military vehicle to take him away, he shook hands with the driver. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is the embodiment of our highest human ideals—courage, compassion, steadfastness. He is a true Gazan doctor. His lawyer (the doctor was denied legal visits for much of his incarceration) reports that as of his recent visit, Dr. Abu Safiya is approaching death. His entire body, including his face, is covered with bruises. He reports being beaten with a hammer. He has lost perhaps a third of his body weight. He is suffering terribly.

There is an escalated international effort to secure his release. Please, let’s join in by contacting our Congress people and urging them to do whatever they can. Being that Joe Biden and most of his Democratic colleagues are hugely responsible for the Genocide they supported in Gaza, it’s the least they can do. Like the Republicans, many Democrats (I believe that includes a few of our New Mexico Congress people) are on the dole from the Israel lobby. Biden was the number one recipient of AIPAC contributions while in Congress (trackAIPAC.com.) The phone numbers of our NM delegation are: Senator Martin Heinrich 202-224-5521, Senator Ben Ray Lujan 202-224-6621, Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez 202-225-6190, Representative Melanie Stansbury 202-225-6316, and Representative Gabe Vasquez 202-225-2365.

It may be that a million phone calls cannot save the life of the beloved pediatrician, but they might. Calling campaigns can be very effective if enough people participate. Our calls will be reaching the hearts and minds of the staffers, mostly young people who are interested in government careers. And they do influence our Congress people, as evidenced by the large Democratic vote in favor of the recent Resolution to block annual funding of $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel. This Resolution was put forward by a lone Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Sadly, it was defeated.

When I call our Congress people, I ask if they know of Dr. Abu Safiya (most don’t), and tell them I have been following his case on DemocracyNow.org with Amy Goodman and I urge them to check it out.

When most people think of Gaza, of course, they think of the horrible ongoing Genocide in the “Gaza strip” where hundreds of thousands have been brutally killed, maimed, and buried under the rubble. Over 1,100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces since the sham ceasefire of October, 2025. But the “strip” is an Israeli creation. It’s a 25 by 5 mile open-air fenced-in concentration camp. This is where Israel dumped Palestinian refugees from other areas of Palestine that the ever-expanding Zionist state has been conquering and occupying since 1948. Seventy percent of the Gaza population is comprised of these refugees. The “strip,” with its population of 2.3 million, was one of the most densely populated areas on planet earth and approaching uninhabitability.

Now the Israelis are hard at work building a serious separation wall right through Gaza. This will imprison the surviving Gaza population into approximately half of the original Gaza strip while continuing to limit the amount of food, water, medicine, and building materials, etc. that they allow to enter. Gazans are condemned to live in the rubble of their former homes while the bodies of their loved ones decay deep beneath.

Originally Gaza was the largest district in historic Palestine with over 100 towns and villages. It was a fertile and abundant land with numerous freshwater springs, filled with olive and orange groves and fruits of all kinds and a beautiful seacoast that it was safe to fish from. Peace and cooperation existed between Muslims, Jews, and Christians, all of whom opposed the colonial takeover by the British-backed European Zionists.

In closing I want to share a very moving interview with Dr. Abu Safiya that Amy Goodman broadcast on Democracy Now before his arrest:

1. HUSSAMABU SAFIYA: [translated] I always say the situation requires one to stand by our people’s side and not run away from it. Gaza is our homeland, our mother, our beloved, and everything to us. Gaza deserves all of this steadfastness and deserves all of the sacrifices. It is not just about Gaza, but we deserve to be a people that deserves freedom just like every other people on Earth. I think the occupation wants us to get out and for us to ask them to get us out, so they can publicly say that the healthcare system is the one asking to leave and that it wasn’t them who asked us to, but we are aware of that. But we will not leave, God willing, from this place, as I said, for as long as there are humanitarian services to be provided to our people in the northern Gaza Strip.

Please do whatever you can and never forget Gaza. Thank you. Free all of Palestine now.

Addendum: While you have your Senators on the phone, please dissuade them from voting for the NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act. Section 219, which was added to the House bill at the last minute. It combines or “integrates” the Israeli military with the U.S. military, compromising U.S. sovereignty. The bill awards $1.5 trillion to the Defense Department, a 60 percent increase. The bill has now moved to the Senate and it is section1217 called the FUTURES act in the Senate.