Author Archives: News Sources

Syria: The hidden power of Iran

Joost Hiltermann writes: Despite his largely symbolic strike on a Syrian airfield in response to the April 4 nerve gas attack by the Assad regime, President Donald Trump has given no serious indication that he wants to make a broader intervention in Syria. As a candidate, and even as a president, Trump has pledged to leave the region to sort out its own troubles, apart from a stepped-up effort to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS). He may quickly learn, though, that one-off military actions driven by domestic politics have a way of turning into something far more substantial.

Already, tensions with Syria’s close ally, Russia, have been escalating, with little sign that the US administration can bring about a change toward Damascus. Bashar al-Assad long ago learned he can operate with impunity. But even larger questions surround another Assad ally, Iran, which, though less conspicuous, has had a crucial part in the changing course of the war and in the overall balance of power in the region. While the Trump administration regards Iran as enemy, it has yet to articulate a clear policy toward it—or even to take account of its growing influence in Iraq and Syria.

If the Syrian leader ignores the warning conveyed by the Tomahawk missile strike, what will be Trump’s next move? Will he be able to resist the temptation to deepen US involvement in Syria to counter a resurgent Iran? How might this affect the battle against the Islamic State—a battle that has already created an intricate power struggle between the many parties hoping to enjoy the spoils?

Consider the array of forces now in play: in Syria, the war on ISIS has been led by Syrian Kurds affiliated with the PKK, the militant Kurdish party in Turkey, which has been in conflict with the Turkish state for the past 33 years—another US ally. In Iraq, there are the peshmerga, the fighters of a rival Kurdish party, who are competing both with the PKK and with Iraqi Shia militias for control over former ISIS territory. There is Turkey, an avowed enemy of Assad that is currently at war with the PKK and its Syrian affiliates, and has moved troops into both northern Syria and northern Iraq in order to thwart the PKK. There is Russia, which, in intervening on behalf of Assad, has created a major shift in the conflict.

And finally, there is Iran, which has made various alliances with Assad, Shia militias, and Kurdish groups in an effort to expand its control of Iraq and, together with Hezbollah, re-establish a dominant position in the Levant. Moreover, Iran has also benefited from another tactical, if unofficial, alliance—with the United States itself, in their efforts to defeat ISIS in neighboring Iraq.

Given all this, the US strike does nothing so much as complicate an already explosive situation. The loudest cheerleader of Trump’s action last week was Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been especially concerned as Iran and its ally Hezbollah benefit from their tactical military alliance with Russia to prop up the Syrian regime. But whatever advantages some may see in the recent US stand against Assad, it makes it even less likely that a stable postwar order can be achieved.

As my own trip to northern Iraq and northern Syria last month revealed, even as the international coalition makes major gains against the Islamic State, the region’s crises are multiplying. Worse, they are also, increasingly, intersecting, sucking in outside powers with a centripetal force that has proved impossible to withstand. [Continue reading…]

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Bashar al-Assad still has ‘hundreds of tons’ of chemicals stockpiled, former Syrian weapons research chief claims

The Telegraph reports: President Bashar al-Assad continues to retain hundreds of tonnes of his country’s chemical stockpile after deceiving United Nations inspectors sent in to dismantle it, according to Syria’s former chemical weapons research chief and other experts.

Brigadier-General Zaher al-Sakat – who served as head of chemical warfare in the powerful 5th Division of the military until he defected in 2013 – told The Telegraph that Assad’s regime failed to declare large amounts of sarin and its precursor chemicals.

Syria handed over what it said was its entire chemical arsenal to the UN’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in 2014 under a deal negotiated by the US and Russia after hundreds of people were killed in a sarin gas attack in the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. [Continue reading…]

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Mike Conaway emerges from relative obscurity to lead House Russia inquiry

The New York Times reports: President Trump does not know Mike Conaway.

A Republican congressman from a long brush stroke of West Texas, Mr. Conaway recalled meeting with him at the White House with other House Republicans. And he has shaken hands with Mr. Trump, a “standard, 500-people-on-a-rope-line, shaken-hand kind of thing.”

“He wouldn’t know me from third base,” Mr. Conaway said.

Whether he has exchanged pleasantries with the president may not have mattered before, but it does now. Mr. Conaway is taking over the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election. He is replacing Representative Devin Nunes, the California Republican whose suspiciously cozy relationship with Mr. Trump derailed the inquiry before he was ultimately forced to step aside.

Mr. Nunes’s missteps have thrust Mr. Conaway, a low-profile, old-guard Republican, into the spotlight as the accidental heir to a potentially explosive investigation swirling around a president from his own party. He said he would dutifully pursue an extraordinary allegation that he appears to find dubious: that Mr. Trump’s associates may have worked with Russian officials to disrupt the election.

The vow of a vigorous investigation may be reassuring to some, but in Mr. Conaway’s district, many dismiss it as an effort to disparage Mr. Trump. On top of that, Mr. Conaway has never been under the glare of national scrutiny. [Continue reading…]

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Deportation and the refugees who ‘fall away from the world’

Rachel Aviv reports: Georgi, a Russian refugee who came to Sweden with his family when he was five years old, could talk at length about the virtues of the Volvo. His doctor described him as “the most ‘Swedeified’ in his family.” He was also one of the most popular boys in his class. For his thirteenth birthday, two friends listed some of the qualities that he evoked: energetic, fun, happy all the time, good human being, amazingly kind, awesome at soccer, sly.

Georgi’s father, Soslan, had helped found a pacifist religious sect in North Ossetia, a Russian province that borders Georgia. Soslan said that in 2007 security forces demanded that he disband the sect, which rejected the entanglement of the Russian Orthodox Church with the state, and threatened to kill him if he refused. He fled to Sweden with his wife, Regina, and their two children, and applied for asylum, but his claim was denied, because the Swedish Migration Board said that he hadn’t proved that he would be persecuted if he returned to Russia.

Sweden permits refugees to reapply for asylum, and in 2014, having lived in hiding in central Sweden for six years, the family tried again. They argued that there were now “particularly distressing circumstances,” a provision that allowed the board to consider how deportation will affect a child’s psychological health. “It would be devastating if Georgi were forced to leave his community, his friends, his school, and his life,” the headmaster of Georgi’s school, Rikard Floridan, wrote in a letter to the board. He described Georgi as “an example to all classmates,” a student who spoke in “mature and nuanced language” and showed a “deep gratitude for the school.”

In the summer of 2015, shortly before he entered seventh grade, Georgi learned that the Migration Board had rejected his family’s application again. The news came in a letter, which he translated for his parents, who couldn’t read Swedish.

They appealed the board’s decision, and Georgi tried to focus on school as he waited for more news. Not long afterward, a friend on his floor-hockey team stopped coming to practice. Georgi was distraught when he learned that the teammate, a refugee from Afghanistan, had been deported with his family, “as if they were criminals,” he said. Georgi became sullen and aloof, and he stopped speaking Russian. He said that the words were just sounds, whose meaning he could no longer decipher. He withdrew from his parents, whom he accused of having failed to assimilate. His nine-year-old brother, Savl, acted as the family’s interpreter. “Why haven’t you been learning Swedish?” Georgi said in Swedish to his brother, who translated the words into Russian for their parents.

In December, 2015, the Migration Board rejected their final appeal, and, in a letter, told the family, “You must leave Sweden.” Their deportation to Russia was scheduled for April. Soslan said that to his children Russia “might as well be the moon.” Georgi read the letter silently, dropped it on the floor, went upstairs to his room, and lay down on the bed. He said that his body began to feel as if it were entirely liquid. His limbs felt soft and porous. All he wanted to do was close his eyes. Even swallowing required an effort that he didn’t feel he could muster. He felt a deep pressure in his brain and in his ears. He turned toward the wall and pounded his fist against it. In the morning, he refused to get out of bed or to eat. Savl poured Coca-Cola into a teaspoon and fed Georgi small sips. The soda dribbled down his chin.

At the recommendation of neighbors, Georgi’s parents called Elisabeth Hultcrantz, an ear-nose-and-throat doctor who volunteers for the charity Doctors of the World. Three days after Georgi took to his bed, Hultcrantz drove to his home, a red wooden cottage with white trim in the farmlands of Garpenberg, a hundred and twenty miles northwest of Stockholm. Georgi was wearing boxers and short athletic socks. He appeared to be asleep. A tulip-patterned blanket had been pulled up to his chin. When Hultcrantz touched him, his eyelids trembled, but he didn’t move. Using a pillow, she propped up his head, but it flopped to the side. “He provides no contact whatsoever,” she wrote.

After a week, Georgi had lost thirteen pounds. Hultcrantz, a professor emeritus at Linköping University, urged the family to take him to the emergency room in Falun, a city forty miles away. He hadn’t eaten for four days and had not spoken a full sentence in a week.

A doctor at the hospital wrote that Georgi “lies completely still on the examination table.” His reflexes were intact and his pulse and blood pressure were normal. The doctor lifted Georgi’s wrists a few inches above his forehead and then dropped them. “They fall down on his face,” she wrote. A nurse noted that he showed “no reaction to caregiving.”

The next day, a doctor inserted a feeding tube through Georgi’s nostril. “He showed no resistance,” Soslan said. “Nothing.” Georgi was given a diagnosis of uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome, an illness that is said to exist only in Sweden, and only among refugees. The patients have no underlying physical or neurological disease, but they seem to have lost the will to live. The Swedish refer to them as de apatiska, the apathetic. “I think it is a form of protection, this coma they are in,” Hultcrantz said. “They are like Snow White. They just fall away from the world.” [Continue reading…]

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North Korean missile launch fails, and a show of strength fizzles

The New York Times reports: North Korea launched a ballistic missile Sunday morning from near its submarine base in Sinpo on its east coast, but the launch was the latest in a series of failures just after liftoff, according to American and South Korean military officials.

The timing was a deep embarrassment for the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, because the missile appeared to have been launched to show off his daring as a fleet of American warships approached his country to deter provocations.

Cmdr. Dave Benham, a spokesman for the United States Pacific Command, said the military had “detected and tracked what we assess was a North Korean missile launch at 11:21 a.m. Hawaii time April 15.”

The missile blew up almost immediately, and the type of missile involved is still being assessed, he said. [Continue reading…]

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Car bomb kills scores of Syrians evacuating town after two years of siege

The Washington Post reports: A car bomb in northern Syria killed more than 100 people Saturday when it ripped through buses evacuating residents from a town besieged by rebels for more than two years.

Syrian state television showed bodies strewn across the ground, the charred vehicles still packed with their passengers’ possessions. By late afternoon, the road was lined with body bags.

The attack served as a bloody reminder of the human stakes for regional powers as they broker a complex population swap, moving some 30,000 Syrians between government- and rebel-held territory.

The buses had left the northern town of Fouaa on Friday as part of a long-awaited first phase of that agreement. Those on board had spent years under siege by extremist rebels, living in fear and without access to regular food or medicine.

Eyewitnesses to the attack said the air filled with screams as passengers, some of them on fire, staggered out of the cloud of dust.

A man who gave his name as Ali described watching a frail old woman stumble and fall. “We reached her too late, her leg had snapped and there was nothing we could do. What did she do to deserve this? She was just someone’s mother.”

The White Helmets rescue group said its volunteers had recovered more than 100 bodies from the wreckage, and that another 55 people had been injured. The death toll was expected to rise.

In one video from the site, a shaken reporter said the dead included civilians as well as rebel fighters from the area where the blast occurred. Using a cellphone camera to capture the devastation, his video showed the charred bodies of two small children dangling from vehicles.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, and its implications for the broader transfer deal were unclear.

Overseen by Qatar and Iran, the negotiations had negligible input from the Syrian government, underscoring the extent to which President Bashar al-Assad has lost control in certain areas.

The population shift is an attempt to alleviate the hardships of residents of towns under siege by both rebel and government forces.

Each side has used the civilians it surrounded as bargaining chips to gain leverage over the other.

Some 2.3 million Syrians lived under complete siege or in areas at risk, according to Siege Watch, a Washington-based monitoring group. [Continue reading…]

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Steve Bannon was doomed

Frank Bruni writes: If you’re any student of politics, you saw Steve Bannon on the cover of Time magazine in early February — “The Great Manipulator,” it called him — and knew to start the countdown then.

Dead strategist walking.

He’d crossed the line that a politician’s advisers mustn’t, to a place and prominence where only the most foolish of them tread. Or at best he’d failed to prevent the media from tugging him there.

He was fine so long as he was a whisperer. On the campaign trail and on the Potomac, you can whisper all you want.

He was damned the moment he was cast as a puppeteer. That means there’s a puppet in the equation, and no politician is going to accept that designation, least of all one who stamps his name in gold on anything that stands still long enough to be stamped. Or whose debate performance included the repartee: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.”

“I’m my own strategist,” the president told The New York Post early last week, and the message to Bannon couldn’t have been louder and clearer if it included a four-letter word. [Continue reading…]

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Assad opponents seek justice for Syria’s war victims

The New York Times reports: The evidence is staggering.

Three tons of captured Syrian government documents, providing a chilling and extensive catalog of the state’s war crimes, are held by a single organization in Europe. A Syrian police photographer fled with pictures of more than 6,000 dead at the hands of the state, many of them tortured. The smartphone alone has broken war’s barriers: Records of crimes are now so graphic, so immediate, so overwhelming.

Yet six years since the war began, this mountain of documentation — more perhaps than in any conflict before it — has brought little justice. The people behind the violence remain free, and there is no clear path to bring the bulk of the evidence before any court, anywhere.

More than 400,000 people have been killed in the Syrian war. Half the country’s population has been displaced. Syrian human rights groups list more than 100,000 people as missing, either detained or killed. Tens of thousands languish in government custody, where torture, deprivation, filth and overcrowding are so severe that a United Nations commission said they amounted to “extermination,” a crime against humanity.

But so far, there is only one war-crimes case pending against Syrian officials: filed in Spain, over a man who died in government custody.

No cases have gone to the International Criminal Court. Syria never joined it, so the court’s chief prosecutor cannot start an investigation on her own. The United Nations Security Council could refer a case to the court, but Russia has repeatedly used its veto power to shield Syria from international condemnation. And even if the Council were to take action, President Bashar al-Assad and his top officials are battened down in Damascus, making their arrests difficult, to say the least. [Continue reading…]

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Scott Pruitt calls for an ‘exit’ from the Paris accord, sharpening the Trump White House’s climate rift

The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s top environment official called for an “exit” from the historic Paris agreement Thursday, the first time such a high-ranking administration official has so explicitly disavowed the agreement endorsed by nearly 200 countries to fight climate change.

Speaking with “Fox & Friends,” Pruitt commented, “Paris is something that we need to really look at closely. It’s something we need to exit in my opinion.”

“It’s a bad deal for America,” Pruitt continued. “It was an America second, third, or fourth kind of approach. China and India had no obligations under the agreement until 2030. We front-loaded all of our costs.”

Pruitt’s claim about China and India having “no obligations” until 2030 is incorrect — while these countries do indeed have 2030 targets, they are already acting now to reduce their emissions by investing in renewable energy and other initiatives. [Continue reading…]

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Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump: Pillars of family-driven West Wing

The New York Times reports: One has an office down the hall from the president in the White House; the other just moved into an office a floor up. One recently visited war-torn Iraq as the president’s emissary; the other will soon head to Berlin at the invitation of Germany’s chancellor.

Both have seats at the table at any meeting they choose to attend, join lunches with foreign leaders and enjoy “walk-in privileges” to the Oval Office. And with the marginalization of Stephen K. Bannon, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have emerged as President Trump’s most important advisers, at least for now.

More openly than any president before him, Mr. Trump is running his West Wing like a family business, and as he has soured on Mr. Bannon, his combative chief strategist, he has turned to his daughter and son-in-law. Their ascendance has some conservative supporters fretting about the rising influence of the urbane young New Yorkers, as some moderates and liberals swallow concerns about nepotism in the hope that the couple will temper the temperamental president. [Continue reading…]

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FBI documents detail how the Russians try to recruit spies

CNN reports: It is a scene ripped from Hollywood spy thrillers: Russian agents living and working among everyday, American citizens as cover for their true mission of stealing state secrets.

In the real world, it is highly unlikely that your neighbor, coworker or mailman is actually a clandestine Russian operative working under a false identity. But that certainly does not mean the art of espionage has gone out of style in the world of international intelligence gathering, particularly between the United States and its former Cold War foe.

Amid all of the accusations and speculation pouring out of the investigations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, the notion that foreign spies are using old-school tactics and personally recruiting agents to divulge sensitive information is actually widely accepted among intelligence officials.

There is no doubt that the rise of information warfare and cyberespionage has changed the spy game in the years since the Cold War. But the playbook on how to target, recruit and manipulate sources has generally stayed the same. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey investigating 17, some Americans, accused in failed coup

The New York Times reports: A Turkish prosecutor has opened an investigation into 17 people accused of fomenting last year’s failed coup, including many prominent American officials, academics and politicians, state news media reported on Saturday.

Among those placed under investigation by the chief prosecutor in Istanbul are John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. chief; Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York; Preet Bharara, the former United States attorney for the Southern District of New York; and David Cohen, the head of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, according to the Anadolu Agency, a state-run news wire.

The investigation was announced just a day before a national referendum to expand the powers of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leading to speculation that the two events were linked.

Throughout the campaign, Mr. Erdogan and his allies have frequently manufactured diplomatic spats with European countries, in what some analysts described as a bid to persuade nationalist voters to vote “yes” to his proposed reforms to secure Turkey’s place in the world. [Continue reading…]

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Your government’s hacking tools are not safe

Motherboard reports: Recent data breaches have made it startlingly clear hacking tools used by governments really are at risk of being exposed. The actual value of the information included in each of these dumps varies, and some may not be all that helpful in and of themselves, but they still highlight a key point: hackers or other third parties can obtain powerful tools of cyber espionage that are supposedly secure. And in most cases, the government does not appear to clean up the fallout, leaving the exploits open to be re-used by scammers, criminals, or anyone else—for any purpose.

It’s as if someone posted a skeleton key online for breaking into an unimaginable number of locks.

“What we learn from the disclosures and leaks of the last months is that unknown vulnerabilities are maintained secret even after they’ve been clearly lost, and that is plain irresponsible and unacceptable,” Claudio Guarnieri, a technologist from Amnesty International, told Motherboard in an online chat. [Continue reading…]

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Hackers release files indicating NSA monitored global bank transfers

Reuters reports: Hackers released documents and files on Friday that cybersecurity experts said indicated the U.S. National Security Agency had accessed the SWIFT interbank messaging system, allowing it to monitor money flows among some Middle Eastern and Latin American banks.

The release included computer code that could be adapted by criminals to break into SWIFT servers and monitor messaging activity, said Shane Shook, a cyber security consultant who has helped banks investigate breaches of their SWIFT systems.

The documents and files were released by a group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers. Some of the records bear NSA seals, but Reuters could not confirm their authenticity.

The NSA could not immediately be reached for comment.

Also published were many programs for attacking various versions of the Windows operating system, at least some of which still work, researchers said.

In a statement to Reuters, Microsoft, maker of Windows, said it had not been warned by any part of the U.S. government that such files existed or had been stolen. [Continue reading…]

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North Korea displays apparently new missiles as U.S. carrier group approaches

Reuters reports: North Korea displayed what appeared to be new long-range and submarine-based missiles on the 105th birth anniversary of its founding father, Kim Il Sung, on Saturday, as a nuclear-powered U.S. aircraft carrier group steamed towards the region.

Missiles appeared to be the main theme of a giant military parade, with Kim’s grandson, leader Kim Jong Un, taking time to greet the commander of the Strategic Forces, the branch that oversees the missile arsenal.

A U.S. Navy attack on a Syrian airfield this month with Tomahawk missiles raised questions about U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans for reclusive North Korea, which has conducted several missile and nuclear tests in defiance of U.N. sanctions, regularly threatening to destroy the United States. [Continue reading…]

Politico reports: President Donald Trump would be best served to simply ignore the provocations of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, a former acting director of the CIA said Friday, and is “making it worse” by replying with a show of force.

Kim has moved his repressive, communist state to the top of the president’s international priority list in recent weeks, first with a missile test and now with preparations consistent with the test of a nuclear weapon. North Korea was a main point of discussion during the president’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week, and last weekend Trump ordered the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and its accompanying battle group into the waters off the Korean peninsula.

“We have a new president and Kim Jong Un is trying to challenge him, is trying to get him back to the negotiating table,” former CIA acting Director Mike Morell said Friday on “CBS This Morning,” praising former President Barack Obama for largely ignoring the North Korean regime’s efforts at saber rattling. “Kim Jong Un wants to get back to a situation where we give them gifts when they do something bad. And then we are also making it worse, right? With our bluster and by sending aircraft carriers in there, we’re raising the crisis.” [Continue reading…]

Josh Rogin writes: Despite heated rhetoric about potential military conflict, the Trump administration’s official policy on North Korea is not aimed at regime change, but rather seeks to impose “maximum pressure” on Pyongyang in the hopes of returning to negotiations to get rid of its growing nuclear arsenal. That’s the result of a comprehensive policy review the Trump White House completed this month.

Tensions couldn’t be higher as the regime of Kim Jong Un signals that it may soon detonate its sixth nuclear bomb and North Korean officials say they are ready to “go to war” if provoked by the United States. The United States has moved significant military assets into the region, and officials are even signaling that the United States is capable of launching a preemptive strike.

But behind the scenes, the Trump administration has completed a two-month comprehensive review of the North Korea policy that was approved by all of the top National Security Council officials this month, a senior White House official who has read the policy confirmed to me. [Continue reading…]

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Just what is Trump trying to do in Syria?

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon write: One week after President Donald Trump’s cruise-missile strike against Syria, one fact stands out above all others: The White House and secretary of state are inexplicably incapable of conveying American intentions to friends, foes, the American public and all other concerned parties. Leaders around the world can reasonably wonder whether the U.S. government has telegraphed its determination to do as little as humanly possible to step Syria’s long bloodletting or lit the fuse to World War III.

Effective signaling in foreign policy and warfare is both vital and no simple matter, as every president discovers. But the confusion sown by the April 6 raid on the Shayrout air base—which has been followed by wildly varying, often irreconcilable public statements heralding far-reaching political changes and a new approach to stopping mass atrocities—is nothing short of remarkable.

Let’s start with the the scale of the air raid itself. In the annals of pinprick strikes, Trump’s Tomahawk attack now stands as the pinprickiest. Republican politicians began using the term pinprick strike in 1998 when the Clinton administration targeted Iraqi military installations suspected of housing weapons of mass destruction. During that four-day campaign, the United States and Britain together launched 425 submarine, ship and air-launched cruise missiles and flew 600 manned aircraft sorties, destroying nearly 100 targets throughout Iraq. Obviously, by that standard, last week’s strike—which consisted of firing 59 Tomahawk missiles at a single Syrian air base—was a different and vastly inferior species. [Continue reading…]

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Estonia: The little spycatcher who could

Michael Weiss writes: Estonia regained its independence in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and had no time at all to reconstitute its security services from scratch; it took a calculated gamble that grandfathering in many old hands from the ancien régime, the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, wouldn’t result in Swiss cheesing its service with loyalists to the former occupying superpower.

One such transitional figure, a former KGB colonel named Herman Simm, who reinvented himself as a champion of Estonian self-determination, worked his way up to the head of security at the Estonian Defense Ministry. In 2004, when the country joined NATO, Simm established the National Security Authority, a department in the Defense Ministry which gave him access to whatever classified intelligence was shared among the then 26 allied countries. Two years later, Simm was awarded two medals: one from Estonia’s president for “service to the Estonian nation,” and the other from his Russian handler announcing Simm’s promotion to the rank of major-general in the SVR, the branch of Moscow’s own reconstituted KGB in charge of foreign intelligence.

Simm had been a spy who fed reams of sensitive NATO secrets back to Moscow Center. Funnily enough, the one secret that he kept being asked to uncover was the one he was unable to because it didn’t exist: NATO’s invasion plan for Russia.

He was finally arrested in 2008, a year after Russian cyber hackers shut down Estonia’s e-government and digital banking sector for the better part of 24 hours in retaliation for the relocation of a Red Army World War II monument, which precipitated drunken riots in central Tallinn.

NATO subsequently named Simm the “most damaging” foreign operative in Alliance history. It was a grave national embarrassment for a new member-state that had sought membership to protect itself from exactly this type of Kremlin subversion and interference but which had hitherto spent the bulk of the ’90s and early aughts trying to root out the seemingly more urgent threats of gangsterism and organized crime—much of that also emanating from its eastern neighbor. [Continue reading…]

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Jeff Sessions, unleashed at the border

A New York Times editorial says: Attorney General Jeff Sessions went to the border in Arizona on Tuesday and declared it a hellscape, a “ground zero” of death and violence where Americans must “take our stand” against a tide of evil flooding up from Mexico.

It was familiar Sessions-speak, about drug cartels and “transnational gangs” poisoning and raping and chopping off heads, things he said for years on the Senate floor as the gentleman from Alabama. But with a big difference: Now he controls the machinery of federal law enforcement, and his gonzo-apocalypto vision of immigration suddenly has force and weight behind it, from the officers and prosecutors and judges who answer to him.

When Mr. Sessions got to the part about the “criminal aliens and the coyotes and the document forgers” overthrowing our immigration system, the American flag behind him had clearly heard enough — it leaned back and fell over as if in a stupor. An agent rushed to rescue it, and stood there for the rest of the speech: a human flag stand and metaphor. A guy with a uniform and gun, wrapped in Old Glory, helping to give the Trump administration’s nativist policies a patriotic sheen.

It was in the details of Mr. Sessions’s oratory that his game was exposed. He talked of cities and suburbs as immigrant-afflicted “war zones,” but the crackdown he seeks focuses overwhelmingly on nonviolent offenses, the document fraud and unauthorized entry and other misdeeds that implicate many people who fit no sane definition of brutal criminal or threat to the homeland.

The problem with Mr. Sessions’s turbocharging of the Justice Department’s efforts against what he paints as machete-wielding “depravity” is how grossly it distorts the bigger picture. It reflects his long fixation — shared by his boss, President Trump — on immigration not as an often unruly, essentially salutary force in American history, but as a dire threat. It denies the existence of millions of people who are a force for good, economic mainstays and community assets, less prone to crime than the native-born — workers, parents, children, neighbors and, above all, human beings deserving of dignity and fair treatment under the law. [Continue reading…]

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