Author Archives: News Sources

The Trump administration has become a leading purveyor of the Kremlin’s fake news

John R. Schindler writes: The threat to the West posed by Kremlin lies—what is properly termed disinformation—is something that I and a few other specialists have raised the alarm over for years. After 2016, when Moscow weaponized disinformation to influence our presidential election, this problem is finally getting the public attention it merits, not least because identical Russian espionage techniques are currently aimed at France and Germany, which have their own elections coming up.

The previous administration ignored this rising problem, shuttering a tiny State Department effort to counter Russian propaganda only months before the Kremlin lie machine went into overdrive against President Obama’s own party. As I’ve pointed out, Obama and his White House bear part of the blame for the Russian havoc wrought last year on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, thanks to their abject unwillingness to confront Vladimir Putin. By refusing to seriously confront Kremlin disinformation and deception, President Obama got more of both.

Now this problem, which shows no signs of going away, has become even more dangerous, since the new administration has taken to parroting Russian disinformation when it suits their political needs. A propaganda loop has emerged with Kremlin lies emerging on Putin regime outlets like RT and Sputnik, then being pushed by far-right conspiracy websites such as Breitbart and InfoWars, and finally winding up on Fox News where they receive a mass audience. [Continue reading…]

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Trump ‘looks forward to visiting China’ says Tillerson

BBC News reports: US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has told China’s President Xi Jinping that President Donald Trump looks forward to visiting his country, and to enhancing understanding between the states.

Mr Tillerson met the Chinese leader in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, as his East Asian tour comes to an end.

Mr Xi said he was glad to see good progress from Mr Tillerson’s meetings.

“You said that China-US relations can only be friendly. I express my appreciation for this,” he said. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: After meeting China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Saturday, Tillerson voiced Chinese catchphrases about the relationship, including the avoidance of conflict and confrontation and the need to build “mutual respect” and strive for “win-win” cooperation.

The phrase “mutual respect” is key: In Beijing, that is taken to mean each side should respect the other’s “core interests.”

In other words: The United States should stay away from issues such as Taiwan, Tibet or Hong Kong — and in principle almost anything China’s Communist Party deems a vital national security concern. Increasingly, that also appears to include China’s territorial claims in the contested waters of the South China Sea.

Several Chinese foreign policy experts called the comments “very positive” and in line with a concept Beijing has long advocated — what it calls “a new model of great power relationships,” which would put the two nations on a roughly equal footing.

Jin Canrong, a Sino-U.S. relations expert at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said Tillerson’s comments came as a surprise.

“China has long been advocating this, but the United States has been reluctant to accept the point of ‘mutual respect,’ ” Jin said. “Tillerson’s comment will be very warmly welcomed by China.”

But Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the United States should use its own language to describe bilateral relations, not embrace China’s.

More importantly, “mutual respect” signals acceptance of “a litany of issues that China views as non-negotiable,” she said. “By agreeing to this, the U.S. is in effect saying that it accepts that China has no room to compromise on these issues.” [Continue reading…]

In an interview with Independent Journal Review, Tillerson said: I do think we’re at somewhat of a historic moment in the U.S.-China relationship. It has been defined for the past 40 years by the opening of China, the Nixon-Kissinger visit. During that time, by and large, the U.S. and China have found a way to exist together in this world, to deal with our conflicts. We’ve never fought a war with each other, other than on the Korean peninsula. That’s the only time we’ve fought a war with each other. And even as China’s country and economy have grown, and now occupies its place in the global economy, we have always managed to exist with one another in a spirit of non-conflict. It doesn’t mean we don’t have differences, but we’ve always found ways to either resolve them or to live with them. Accept that we have differences and move on and still do what’s in the best interest of our people, and China in the best interest of theirs. But I do think because of what is happening globally with people in the world over — globalization itself — that we’re at perhaps at an inflection point in the relationship of global powers in general. And I do think that the Chinese and the U.S. need to have a fresh conversation about what will define the relationship between the United States and China for the next 50 years. We can look back and see how successful we’ve been, 40 years of what I would say has been a very successful relationship with two very powerful nations living with one another without conflict. But now we find that there are issues arising that have gone unresolved. And I think how we are able to talk about those and how we are able to chart our course forward is going to set, potentially, the relationship in a new era of existing together without conflict, in an era of non-conflict. Again, it doesn’t mean we won’t have differences, but we will find how are we going to live with one another for the next 50 years. Because I think there’s a question, perhaps even in the minds of the Chinese: How will the American people, the Chinese people, live with each other in this world for the next half century? [Continue reading…]

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Ready or not, here come Trump and North Korea

Albert Hunt writes: President Donald Trump is a reckless bully with authoritarian leanings and a craving for attention. Kim Jong-un is a reckless bully with dictatorial powers and a craving for attention. Oh yes, and both have fingers on nuclear triggers. That’s why so many national security experts of both political parties struggle to think of a scarier pair.

It’s not just that Kim’s outlaw North Korean regime has accelerated its nuclear weapons capacity and delivery capability, or that Kim sees nuclear weapons as his insurance policy against adversaries.

It’s also that Trump has displayed little appreciation of history or knowledge and a compulsion to show that he’s tough.

Trump has called Kim a “madman,” one of the few things he has gotten right about North Korea. Dealing with him, though, requires measured patience and smart diplomacy — not Trump’s forte — and a reliance on alliances and relationships that he has dismissed.

On his current Asia trip, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that diplomacy with North Korea hasn’t worked and that there’d be a “new approach.” That sounds like just talk. More important, Defense Secretary James Mattis impressed Asia experts during his visit last month to Japan and South Korea, in essence assuring the allies that U.S. commitments were unchanged despite Trump’s “America First” oratory.

There are few Asia specialists in this slow-to-form administration. But if Trump listens to Mattis and H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, there will be a sense of relief in Tokyo, Seoul and Washington about the approach to North Korea. Let’s hope the president doesn’t revert instead to his penchant for relying on gut instincts or his nationalist Svengali, Steve Bannon.[Continue reading…]

Max Fisher writes: A full war, entered deliberately or accidentally, would risk terrible costs.

Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti told a congressional committee in 2016, when he was commander of United States forces in South Korea, that war with North Korea “would be more akin to the Korean War and World War II — very complex, probably high casualty.”

Analysts doubt that the United States could reproduce the rapid military victory it achieved against Iraq in 2003. In the event of war, North Korean plans are thought to call for nuclear attacks against major ports and air bases in South Korea and Japan, halting any American invasion before it could fully begin.

In the meantime, nuclear and chemical strikes against major population centers would be intended to shock the world into capitulating. Missile defense would be of limited use against short-range rockets and of no use against North Korea’s hundreds of artillery pieces, many of which target Seoul, the South Korean capital.

Potentially the hardest question of all is whether such plans would achieve American strategic aims.

Military strikes may be an imperfect tool, analysts say, for solving what is essentially a political problem: the leadership’s belief that it requires an advanced nuclear program to survive.

Strikes short of war would risk deepening, rather than altering, this calculus. Strikes that led to war would risk exactly the nuclear exchange they are meant to forestall. [Continue reading…]

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The denationalization of American Muslims

Peter Beinart writes: On March 6, the zoning board in Bayonne, New Jersey, turned down a request to convert an old warehouse into a mosque. Such denials are happening with increasing frequency in the United States. In the 10 years between 2000 and 2010, the Justice Department intervened seven times against local communities that prevented Muslims from building mosques or other religious institutions. In the six years between 2010 and 2016, that number jumped to 17.

At the zoning board meeting, one woman called Islam a “so-called religion.” Residents claimed the Muslim Brotherhood would control the mosque. The Facebook page of the group “Stop the Mosque in Bayonne” features a man holding a sign that says “Democracy or Sharia Law.”

This is the language of Frank Gaffney. For a decade and a half, Gaffney, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official who heads a small Washington think tank called the Center for Security Policy, has been making two interrelated arguments. First, that the Muslim Brotherhood—which he claims seeks to replace the United States Constitution with a Caliphate based upon Sharia law—secretly controls most American mosques and Muslim organizations. Second, that Islam is not actually a religion. It is a totalitarian political ideology. Thus, its adherents should be treated not like Christians or Jews, but like American Nazis during World War II.

For years, Washington conservatives ridiculed these arguments and stigmatized Gaffney for making them. In 2003, after Gaffney attacked two Muslim staffers in the Bush White House, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist banned him from his influential “Wednesday meeting” of conservative activists. In 2011, according to sources close to the organization, the American Conservative Union informally barred Gaffney from speaking at CPAC, the ACU’s signature event. In 2013, the Bradley Foundation, which had backed the Center for Security Policy since 1988, cut off funds. That same year, Gaffney lost the Washington Times column he had been writing since the late 1990s. As late as December 2015, The Daily Beast declared that, “Frank Gaffney has been shunned by pretty much everyone in conservative intellectual circles.”

Yet less than 18 months later, America is led by a president, Donald Trump, who has frequently cited the Center for Security Policy when justifying his policies towards Muslims. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has called Gaffney “one of the senior thought leaders and men of action in this whole war against Islamic radical jihad.” Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions—who has said “Sharia law fundamentally conflicts with our magnificent constitutional order”—in 2015 won the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame” Award. Trump’s CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, has appeared on Gaffney’s radio program more than 24 times since 2013. Sebastian Gorka, who runs a kind of parallel National Security Council inside the White House called the Strategic Initiatives Group, has appeared on Gaffney’s radio program 18 times during that period. He’s called Sharia “antithetical to the values of this great nation” and recently refused to say whether he considered Islam a religion.

In truth, conservatives never actually marginalized Gaffney’s ideas. Even when shunned in Washington, they grew steadily on the grassroots right in response to conservative disillusionment with America’s post-9/11 wars. Gaffney’s theories represent an effort to “denationalize” American Muslims—to strip them of their national identity and legal protections—with chilling precedents in American and European history. And although these theories have opponents, as well as supporters, in the Trump administration, they are already changing the relationship between American Muslims and their government in frightening ways. [Continue reading…]

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American courts are tackling Islamophobia – why won’t European courts do likewise?

Muneer I Ahmad writes: On both sides of the Atlantic, courts this week have addressed the relationship of Islam to the west, but with radically different approaches and outcomes. In the US, federal courts in Hawaii and Maryland have halted Donald Trump’s second attempt at a Muslim ban. Meanwhile, the European court of justice, Europe’s highest court, has upheld the right of private employers to ban Muslim women from wearing headscarves.

American and European law each embrace principles of religious neutrality and non-discrimination, but the divergent application of those laws reflects different levels of discomfort with religion generally and a demographic anxiety with Islam in particular.

In both the US and Europe, politicians proselytize about Islam as a mortal threat to western civilization, with high degrees of success. The victory of Trump, the ascendancy of Marine Le Pen in France, and the rightward lurch in the Netherlands – notwithstanding the electoral defeat – of Geert Wilders, provide ample evidence that such populism pays political dividends. And yet, while European courts regulate the veil year after year, American courts by and large have refused to take the anti-Muslim bait. [Continue reading…]

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Intelligence chairman: Justice report shows no evidence for Trump’s claims of wiretapping during campaign

The Washington Post reports: The Republican chairman and ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that new documents provided to Congress by the Justice Department provided no proof to support President Trump’s claim that his predecessor had ordered wiretaps of Trump Tower.

“Was there a physical wiretap of Trump Tower? No, but there never was, and the information we got on Friday continues to lead us in that direction,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

He added, “There was no FISA warrant that I’m aware of to tap Trump Tower” — a reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a federal law that governs the issuance of search warrants in U.S. intelligence gathering. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Allegations from the United States that British spy agency GCHQ snooped on Donald Trump during his election campaign are “arrant nonsense”, the deputy head of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) said in an interview on Saturday.

President Trump has stood by unproven claims that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 White House race. On Thursday his spokesman cited a media report that Britain’s GCHQ was behind the surveillance.

Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told BBC News the idea that Britain had a hand in spying on Trump was “just crazy”. [Continue reading…]

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White House installs political aides at Cabinet agencies to be Trump’s eyes and ears

The Washington Post reports: The political appointee charged with keeping watch over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides has offered unsolicited advice so often that after just four weeks on the job, Pruitt has shut him out of many staff meetings, according to two senior administration officials.

At the Pentagon, they’re privately calling the former Marine officer and fighter pilot who’s supposed to keep his eye on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “the commissar,” according to a high-ranking defense official with knowledge of the situation. It’s a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to military units to ensure their commanders remained loyal.

Most members of President Trump’s Cabinet do not yet have leadership teams in place or even nominees for top deputies. But they do have an influential coterie of senior aides installed by the White House who are charged — above all — with monitoring the secretaries’ loyalty, according to eight officials in and outside the administration.

This shadow government of political appointees with the title of senior White House adviser is embedded at every Cabinet agency, with offices in or just outside the secretary’s suite. The White House has installed at least 16 of the advisers at departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and at some smaller agencies such as NASA, according to records first obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request. [Continue reading…]

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An uprising among scientists

Climate Central reports: The current political climate has spurred a growing cadre of scientists to emerge from their labs, offices and fieldwork sites to contest an administration that’s openly hostile to scientific inquiry — particularly when it comes to climate change — and coined the term “alternative facts.”

“We’ve tried to let our data do the talking for us and that has failed miserably,” Kim Cobb, a coral researcher at Georgia Tech, said.

Scientists staged a thousand-strong rally in Boston during the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in late February. Much bigger protests are afoot with the March for Science and its 190 satellite marches planned for April 22. Scientists are also organizing support groups and many have said they are considering running for public office.

The current wave of scientific discontent has the makings of a budding movement. But whether it moves the political dial like the Tea Party or fizzles out like Occupy Wall Street remains to be seen.

Scientists in the streets is not a new thing. They rallied around nuclear disarmament during the Cold War, but they also weren’t the main component of that movement. That makes the current groundswell of scientists leading their own charge a different proposition.

The March for Science is the most visible piece of the new movement, with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, a private planning Facebook group with more than 837,000 members and more than 50,000 volunteers. The march has the potential to go down as one of the largest mass mobilizations by scientists in history. [Continue reading…]

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One Trump advisor really does know all about Putin

Michael Weiss writes: “People person” is not necessarily the first description that comes to mind when one thinks of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Though barely a year into his unlikely presidency of the Russian Federation, that’s more or less how he described himself to Christian Caryl, then Moscow bureau chief at Newsweek. Asked what it was about his KGB training that he believed informed his administration of a country with 11 time zones and around 8,000 nuclear warheads, Putin answered unexpectedly that it was garrulousness that he found most useful from his days in special services:

“To be able to work with people effectively, you have to be able to establish a dialogue, contact; you have to activate everything that is best in your partner. If you want to achieve results, you have to respect your partner. You need to make that person an ally; you have to make that person feel that you and he have something that unites you, that you have common goals.”

Putin was never a spy as properly understood or mythologized. In his rather shabby posting to Dresden in East Germany, during which he spent the majority of the perestroika era observing the collapse of the Soviet Union from a distance, his role was that of a case officer, a recruiter and manager of spies.

There is every indication that he not only ran West German assets who ventured into Dresden but even recruited the odd double agent in the infamous East German security service, the Stasi, between 1985 and 1989. Putin’s deployment coincided with the KGB’s “Operation Luch,” a campaign to steal technological secrets but also, allegedly, to ensure that hardliners in the East German intelligence apparatus remained loyal to the ongoing reforms taking place in Moscow and not to their putative boss, Eric Honecker. (Still the best encapsulation of the Stalinist rigidity of Honecker’s GDR is this celebrated scene from The Lives of Others.)

I’m not quite sure if it’s an irony or a tragedy that the analyst best able to understand Putin’s talent for seducing foreign agents is now beholden to a commander-in-chief believed by many to have been turned by that little man in Moscow’s high castle.
Fiona Hill, the dual British-American citizen and former national intelligence officer with the U.S. National Intelligence Council, was recently named the White House’s senior director for Europe and Russia. She is therefore the most influential Putinologist on a National Security Council that badly needs them.

Her book Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, co-written with Clifford Gaddy, distills the actuating impulses of one the most scrutinized and yet misunderstood men on the planet into six mutually inclusive categories: the Statist, the History Man, the Survivalist, the Outsider, the Free Marketeer, and the Case Officer. Although they claim no one category supersedes any other, their subtitle suggests that Putin’s training in Yuri Andropov’s KGB is the foundation upon which the other five were constructed. [Continue reading…]

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Senators ask Trump adviser, Roger Stone, to preserve any Russia-related documents

The New York Times reports: Roger J. Stone Jr., an informal adviser to President Trump, has been asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee to preserve any records he may have in connection to a broader inquiry into Russian attempts to interfere with United States elections.

The letter sent to Mr. Stone, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, represents the first public indication of the scope of the committee’s inquiry, and possible connections to Mr. Trump’s campaign.

The Senate committee asked Mr. Stone, who is also under scrutiny from other federal investigators, to “preserve and retain all hard copies and electronically stored information as specified below in furtherance of the committee’s ongoing investigation into Russian actions targeting the 2016 U.S. elections and democratic processes globally.”

Mr. Stone confirmed the existence of the letter, which was dated Feb. 17. However, he said he had received it only on Friday, by email. Mr. Stone has acknowledged trading messages over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the online persona that officials believe was actually Russian intelligence officers.

The letter to Mr. Stone was signed by the committee’s chairman, Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and its ranking Democrat, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia. Press officers for Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner declined to comment on the letter.

Democrats and some investigators, as well as some Republicans, have been watching Mr. Stone, a Richard M. Nixon acolyte and self-described “dirty trickster,” more closely since he posted on Twitter in August 2016 about John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, whose private emails were hacked and provided to WikiLeaks. [Continue reading…]

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After six years of war, Syria’s rebels reflect on whether revolution has been worth it

The Independent reports: Almost half a million dead. More than 10.9 million forced to flee their homes, many into the arms of traffickers or graves at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Cities starved into submission by government sieges, tens of thousands disappeared in regime prisons, and the rampant growth of extremist ideology intent on sucking the little life and joy left out of Syria.

An entire generation of children who don’t flinch at explosions or artillery fire in the distance.

Such is the state of the Syrian revolution, six years on since the hopes of the Arab Spring.

No one who took to the streets of Damascus and Aleppo in a “Day of Rage” on 15 March 2011, demanding the release of 15 Deraa teenagers arrested for daubing walls with anti-government graffiti, could foresee the scale of the war to come.

“Your turn, Doctor [Bashar al-Assad],” demonstrators chanted, drawing courage from the recent fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia.

Arrests and beatings did not deter them. After three days of the exceptionally rare protests against authority, the government had had enough. On March 18, four protesters in Deraa – most reports say they were unarmed – were shot by security forces which opened fire on a crowd.

The killings provided the catalyst for a revolution which has morphed into a conflict unlike any other modern war.

Its full repercussions are still yet to be understood.

On the sixth anniversary of the uprising, Syria now shows dangerous signs of descending into an entrenched state of warfare such as that suffered by Iraq and Afghanistan, subject to the whims of internal warlords and proxy powers.

In diplomatic circles, once-strident calls that “Assad must go” are no longer very loud.

Despite round after round of failed peace talks, the UN is adamant a diplomatic solution to the crisis must be agreed, even as Russian and Iranian intervention on the battlefield has once again put a military victory within the Assad government’s reach.

The fall of Aleppo at the end of the last year and election of US President Donald Trump means that 2017 is a turning point for Syria’s opposition.

Most Western players in Syria’s war now operate on the understanding that the best outcome rebel fighters can hope for is free elections in which the embattled ruler agrees to step down.

“The extent to which the West is willing to continue to provide military support for the rebels is uncertain, particularly with Trump so narrowly focused on defeating Isis,” said Tim Eaton, a research fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House.

“Without significantly increased backing, which is not forthcoming, the rebels are in a position where they can’t win.

“That doesn’t mean, though, that they won’t continue to fight, and that there aren’t things to fight for. But six years in, the rebels may be forced to reign in some of their ambitions.”

Most of those either involved in the original peaceful protest movement or the armed resistance to the Assad regime that The Independent spoke to, whether still in Syria or abroad, were initially hesitant to share their thoughts on the country’s future.

Some said they could not possibly put into words what the revolution means to them now.

“I have too much and too little to say,” said one Istanbul-based activist, who asked not to be named. “I was on the side of freedom in 2011, and I am on the side of freedom now. But how many more will have to die? How do I judge that? It’s impossible.” [Continue reading…]

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Why Trump’s plan to slash UN funding could lead to global calamity

Amy B Wang writes: For 16 days, Stephen O’Brien, the United Nation’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, traveled from one afflicted country to another, talking to people who were traumatized. Starving. Desperate for peace.

Many had been displaced, the victims of airstrikes and constant fighting, of drought and imminent famine.

By the time O’Brien returned to the United Nations, the humanitarian chief had committed several statistics to heart, each one illustrating a deep gash the agency needed to address in its efforts around the world.

In Yemen, he said, more than 7 million people are hungry and do not know when they will eat again. That represented a staggering increase of more than 3 million people since January.

In South Sudan, more than 7.5 million needed assistance, including 1 million malnourished children.

In Somalia, 6.2 million were in need of aid.

And in northern Kenya, the number of people who were “food insecure” was likely to reach 4 million by April.

In all, more than 20 million people in those four countries faced starvation and famine, O’Brien said in a lengthy address to the U.N. Security Council on Friday.

O’Brien’s grim report came as President Trump proposed slashing U.S. spending on the United Nations by more than half, as reported by Foreign Policy.

“We’re absolutely reducing funding to the U.N. and to various foreign aid programs,” White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said during a news conference Thursday, according to Fox News. When asked by how much, he replied simply: “A lot.”

The United Nations warned against the proposed cuts Thursday. “Abrupt funding cuts can force the adoption of ad hoc measures that will undermine the impact of longer-term reform efforts,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres’s spokesman said in a statement.

French U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre said the cuts could result in instability worldwide. [Continue reading…]

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China urges U.S. to remain ‘coolheaded’ on North Korea as Tillerson warns of danger

The Washington Post reports: China urged the United States to remain “coolheaded” over North Korea and not to turn its back on dialogue, as visiting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressed a “sense of urgency” to curb dangerous levels of tension on the Korean Peninsula.

On his first trip to Asia this week, Tillerson earlier declared that diplomacy has failed to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear program and that a new approach was needed. On Friday in Seoul, he warned ominously that all options were on the table to counter the threat from Pyongyang.

President Trump weighed in Friday by goading China over Twitter for not doing enough to help prevent its ally from “behaving very badly.”

But in a joint news conference Saturday with his Chinese counterpart, Tillerson struck a more diplomatic note, choosing to play down differences with Beijing and affirm that both countries share the goal of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. [Continue reading…]

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What to ask about Russian hacking

Louise Mensch writes: On Monday, the House Intelligence Committee holds its first hearing on Russia’s hacking of the election. (No date has yet been set for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s parallel investigation.) The list of initial witnesses does not inspire confidence in the House committee’s effectiveness.

It should be relatively easy to get at the truth of whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia over the hacking. I have some relevant experience. When I was a member of Parliament in Britain, I took part in a select committee investigating allegations of phone hacking by the News Corporation. Today, as a New York-based journalist (who, in fact, now works at News Corp.), I have followed the Russian hacking story closely. In November, I broke the story that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court had issued a warrant that enabled the F.B.I. to examine communications between “U.S. persons” in the Trump campaign relating to Russia-linked banks.

So, I have some ideas for how the House committee members should proceed. If I were Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the committee, I would demand to see the following witnesses: Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Richard Burt, Erik Prince, Dan Scavino, Brad Parscale, Roger Stone, Corey Lewandowski, Boris Epshteyn, Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Michael Flynn Jr., Felix Sater, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Michael Cohen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Stephen Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Michael Anton, Julia Hahn and Stephen Miller, along with executives from Cambridge Analytica, Alfa Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Spectrum Health.

There are many more who need to be called, but these would be a first step. As to lines of questioning, here are some suggestions. [Continue reading…]

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Most American young adults see Trump presidency as illegitimate

The Associated Press reports: A majority of young adults – 57% – see Donald Trump’s presidency as illegitimate, including about three-quarters of blacks and large majorities of Latinos and Asians, a new poll has found.

GenForward is a poll of adults age 18 to 30 conducted by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

A slim majority of young whites in the poll, 53%, consider Trump a legitimate president, but even among that group 55% disapprove of the job he’s doing, according to the survey. [Continue reading…]

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How law enforcement is being transformed into warfare

The New York Times reports: This town on the edge of the Appalachians has fewer than 5,000 residents, but the SWAT team was outfitted for war.

At 2:15 a.m. on a moonless night in May 2014, 10 officers rolled up a driveway in an armored Humvee, three of them poised to leap off the running boards. They carried Colt submachine guns, light-mounted AR-15 rifles and Glock .40-caliber sidearms. Many wore green body armor and Kevlar helmets. They had a door-breaching shotgun, a battering ram, sledgehammers, Halligan bars for smashing windows, a ballistic shield and a potent flash-bang grenade.

The target was a single-story ranch-style house about 50 yards off Lakeview Heights Circle. Not even four hours earlier, three informants had bought $50 worth of methamphetamine in the front yard. That was enough to persuade the county’s chief magistrate to approve a no-knock search warrant authorizing the SWAT operators to storm the house without warning.

The point man on the entry team found the side door locked, and nodded to Deputy Jason Stribling, who took two swings with the metal battering ram. As the door splintered near the deadbolt, he yelled, “Sheriff’s department, search warrant!” Another deputy, Charles Long, had already pulled the pin on the flash-bang. He placed his left hand on Deputy Stribling’s back for stability, peered quickly into the dark and tossed the armed explosive about three feet inside the door.

It landed in a portable playpen.

As policing has militarized to fight a faltering war on drugs, few tactics have proved as dangerous as the use of forcible-entry raids to serve narcotics search warrants, which regularly introduce staggering levels of violence into missions that might be accomplished through patient stakeouts or simple knocks at the door.

Thousands of times a year, these “dynamic entry” raids exploit the element of surprise to effect seizures and arrests of neighborhood drug dealers. But they have also led time and again to avoidable deaths, gruesome injuries, demolished property, enduring trauma, blackened reputations and multimillion-dollar legal settlements at taxpayer expense, an investigation by The New York Times found.

For the most part, governments at all levels have chosen not to quantify the toll by requiring reporting on SWAT operations. But The Times’s investigation, which relied on dozens of open-record requests and thousands of pages from police and court files, found that at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in such raids from 2010 through 2016. Scores of others were maimed or wounded. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian defector who documented Assad’s atrocities returning to Washington

Josh Rogin writes: The Syrian defector known as “Caesar,” who brought the world the largest trove of evidence of mass atrocities perpetrated by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, is returning to Washington this weekend. Three years after he helped expose some of the worst war crimes of our generation, the victims of those crimes are still a long way from getting justice.

From 2011 to 2013, Caesar worked as a military photographer in the Syrian army, forced to meticulously document the torture and murder of thousands of men, women and children inside Assad’s jails. When he fled Syria in 2013, he brought with him over 55,000 images that show the killing of over 11,000 civilians in custody, along with documents detailing the Syrian government’s highly organized system of mass murder.

The photos, some of which were released publicly in 2014, show bodies starved, tortured and mutilated. The Syrian government kept detailed records. Assad’s “machinery of death” was the worst since the Nazis, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes Stephen Rapp said at the time.

Caesar testified before Congress in the summer of 2014 and explained to U.S. lawmakers that the evidence he smuggled out of Syria showed only a small segment of the overall government operation and that tens of thousands of civilians were still being tortured and murdered in Assad’s prisons.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum took up Caesar’s cause and helped build an effort to raise public awareness about the Syrian government’s mass atrocities, working with elements of the Syrian opposition. Caesar’s photos were shown in the halls of Congress, the United Nations and the European Parliament. In 2015, the FBI verified the authenticity of the photos after an extensive forensic investigation.

Now, Caesar is returning to the United States with a simple question: What progress has been made? For those pushing for accountability, justice and a halt to the slaughter, the sad answer is not enough. [Continue reading…]

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Leaked emails reveal Nigel Farage’s long-standing links to Julian Assange

Business Insider reports: There was much confusion Thursday [3/9] when Nigel Farage was spotted by BuzzFeed leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in London — the residence of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Asked why he was there, Farage replied that he couldn’t remember what he was doing in the building, adding, “I never discuss where I go or who I see.”

Emails leaked to Business Insider, however, reveal that UKIP under Farage’s leadership had long-standing links to Assange. [Continue reading…]

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