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Being at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic

“We know how to take care of people with respiratory failure,” Dr. Nick Mark, a Seattle-based critical care doctor on the front lines of Washington’s COVID-19 crisis, says to our host Al Letson. “But we don't know how to treat COVID-19.” 

Mark says that as new patients surge in, he and his colleagues are being forced to improvise care and protective measures. “Feeling like I don't know what's going on makes me feel very out of control,” he says. “And that's a very scary feeling.”

Yet amid the chaos and disruptions COVID-19 has presented, Mark also insists that people look for opportunities to connect, to be humane toward each other. 

“What these people are going through is really important,” he says. “And I think anything that we can do to be compassionate to them – whether it's helping them FaceTime with their loved ones so they can have some contact or whether it's just as health care providers spending an extra minute or two putting your hand on somebody's shoulder – little things like that, I think, are really important now.”

A victim of the war on terror seeks justice, years later

Seventeen years after President George W. Bush announced the start of the Iraq War, we’ve teamed up with “The United States of Anxiety,” a podcast from WNYC Studios, to tell the story of one Iraqi journalist who says he was tortured by U.S. contractors. 

In the early days of the war, Salah Hasan Nusaif al-Ejaili was reporting on outbursts of violence across his country, including a bombing in the city of Baqubah. When American troops learned that he worked for Al Jazeera, a network U.S. officials had falsely accused of spreading al-Qaida propaganda, they arrested him, brought him to Abu Ghraib prison and abused him repeatedly.

Years later, Ejaili and two other men filed a lawsuit against CACI, a private contractor that they say helped oversee the abuse. But in doing so, they ran into a troubling loophole for non-U.S. citizens living abroad who seek justice from the U.S. government: sovereign immunity. 

“It's a weird carryover from British common law,” reporter Seth Freed Wessler explains in this week’s episode. “It means the king can do no wrong. In the American version, it basically means, as a legal matter, the government can’t be held liable for wrongdoing – even in Iraq, in a prison that the U.S. was in full control of.”

CACI meanwhile has argued that it’s the beneficiary of so-called derivative sovereign immunity, meaning that it was operating effectively as the “king’s arm,” Wessler explains. If you can’t sue the king, surely you can’t sue his arm either.

Hear the episode.

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.