Author Archives: News Sources

Donald Trump’s new foreign policy advisers are as rotten as his steaks

Shane Harris writes: A Christian academic accused of inciting violence against Muslims. A former Pentagon official who blocked investigations into Bush administration bigwigs. And an assortment of self-professed experts probably few in established foreign policy circles have ever heard of. These are the minds advising Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on foreign policy and national security.

Trump, who has been pressed for months to name his council of advisers, revealed five in a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board on Tuesday: Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares, and Joseph E. Schmitz.

Few of these names will register with most voters, or many experts in Washington. None of them are especially sought after for foreign policy views and national security expertise in the nation’s capital — which may be why they’re attractive to Trump.

Trump revealed little about what specific advice they’d given so far, or how any of them may have shaped Trump’s surprising new position that the U.S. should rethink whether it needs to remain in the seven-decades-old NATO alliance with Europe.

Sounding more like a CFO than a commander-in-chief, Trump said of the alliance, “We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore,” adding, “NATO is costing us a fortune and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money.” [Continue reading…]

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What Americans don’t get about Nordic countries

Anu Partanen writes: Bernie Sanders is hanging on, still pushing his vision of a Nordic-like socialist utopia for America, and his supporters love him for it. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is chalking up victories by sounding more sensible. “We are not Denmark,” she said in the first Democratic debate, pointing instead to America’s strengths as a land of freedom for entrepreneurs and businesses. Commentators repeat endlessly the mantra that Sanders’s Nordic-style policies might sound nice, but they’d never work in the U.S. The upshot is that Sanders, and his supporters, are being treated a bit like children — good-hearted, but hopelessly naive. That’s probably how Nordic people seem to many Americans, too.

A Nordic person myself, I left my native Finland seven years ago and moved to the U.S. Although I’m now a U.S. citizen, I hear these kinds of comments from Americans all the time — at cocktail parties and at panel discussions, in town hall meetings and on the opinion pages. Nordic countries are the way they are, I’m told, because they are small, homogeneous “nanny states” where everyone looks alike, thinks alike, and belongs to a big extended family. This, in turn, makes Nordic citizens willing to sacrifice their own interests to help their neighbors. Americans don’t feel a similar kinship with other Americans, I’m told, and thus will never sacrifice their own interests for the common good. What this is mostly taken to mean is that Americans will never, ever agree to pay higher taxes to provide universal social services, as the Nordics do. Thus Bernie Sanders, and anyone else in the U.S. who brings up Nordic countries as an example for America, is living in la-la land.

But this vision of homogenous, altruistic Nordic lands is mostly a fantasy. The choices Nordic countries have made have little to do with altruism or kinship. Rather, Nordic people have made their decisions out of self-interest. Nordic nations offer their citizens — all of their citizens, but especially the middle class—high-quality services that save people a lot of money, time, and trouble. This is what Americans fail to understand: My taxes in Finland were used to pay for top-notch services for me. [Continue reading…]

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Does Roland Barthes shed light on Donald Trump?

Judd Legum writes: Barthes is best known for his work in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. But he wasn’t limited to lengthy, esoteric treatises. Rather, Barthes published much of his work in short, accessible pieces breaking down elements of popular culture. The New York Times described Barthes as the godfather of the TV recap.

His most famous essay, published in his 1957 book Mythologies, focuses on professional wrestling. Could an essay about professional wrestling hold the key to understanding Trump’s appeal? It’s worth noting that, before he was a presidential candidate, Trump was an active participant in the WWE. In 2013, Trump was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

In his essay, Barthes contrasts pro wrestling to boxing.

This public knows very well the distinction between wrestling and boxing; it knows that boxing is a Jansenist sport, based on a demonstration of excellence. One can bet on the outcome of a boxing-match: with wrestling, it would make no sense. A boxing- match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time… The logical conclusion of the contest does not interest the wrestling-fan, while on the contrary a boxing-match always implies a science of the future. In other words, wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result.

In the current campaign, Trump is behaving like a professional wrestler while Trump’s opponents are conducting the race like a boxing match. As the rest of the field measures up their next jab, Trump decks them over the head with a metal chair. [Continue reading…]

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Voices from a different Syria

Robyn Creswell writes: As the Syrian conflict passes its fifth anniversary, a partial cease-fire and the withdrawal of some Russian forces has brought what many are calling the best chance in years for peace to begin to take hold. And yet as international negotiators try to bring together the government with dozens of different opposition groups, a larger question about the deeply divided country remains: What do Syrians themselves want? The lead-up to possible talks has been dominated by geopolitical and strategic considerations rather than appeals to popular will. Many foreign observers, confronted by daily images of violence and its victims, may wonder if there still is a Syria at all beyond the war.

The work of the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara provides a strikingly different picture of Syrians and their country. The members of Abounaddara, an Arabic phrase meaning “the man with glasses,” began making films in 2010, but it was Syria’s version of the Arab Spring that gave them an urgent sense of purpose. For the past five years, they have posted a new documentary film every week, resulting in an archive of nearly four hundred shorts that can be watched for free on Vimeo. By contrast with the ghoulish habits of television coverage of the war, Abounaddara’s films, which typically run two to three minutes, show individual Syrians who speak — often directly to the camera — rather than mute collectives of the dead.

These films, whose subjects include soccer players for the Syrian national team, bereaved parents, former prisoners of ISIS, intellectuals, and refugees, are powerful portraits of individual Syrians, yet they can also be hard to read, in part because we’re told so little about the subjects and settings. This withholding of information is clearly by design. The films often begin and end in medias res, leaving the viewer to puzzle out their significance. They require one to think as well as to look. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA just declassified the document that supposedly justified the Iraq invasion

Jason Leopold reports: Thirteen years ago, the intelligence community concluded in a 93-page classified document used to justify the invasion of Iraq that it lacked “specific information” on “many key aspects” of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

But that’s not what top Bush administration officials said during their campaign to sell the war to the American public. Those officials, citing the same classified document, asserted with no uncertainty that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, concealing a vast chemical and biological weapons arsenal, and posing an immediate and grave threat to US national security.

Congress eventually concluded that the Bush administration had “overstated” its dire warnings about the Iraqi threat, and that the administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMD program were “not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.” But that underlying intelligence reporting — contained in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was used to justify the invasion — has remained shrouded in mystery until now. [Continue reading…]

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The Trump phenomenon is what the founders feared and Lincoln warned against

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Peter Wehner writes: “I think you’d have riots.” So said Donald J. Trump last week, when he was asked by CNN what he thought would happen if he arrived at the Republican Convention this summer a few delegates short of the 1,237 needed to win outright and didn’t set forth from Cleveland as the party’s nominee.

It is stunning to contemplate, particularly for those of us who are lifelong Republicans, but we now live in a time when the organizing principle that runs through the campaign of the Republican Party’s likely nominee isn’t adherence to a political philosophy — Mr. Trump has no discernible political philosophy — but an encouragement to political violence.

Mr. Trump’s supporters will dismiss this as hyperbole, but it is the only reasonable conclusion that his vivid, undisguised words allow for. As the examples pile up, we should not become inured to them. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Mr. Trump said about a protester in Nevada. (“In the old days,” Mr. Trump fondly recalled, protesters would be “carried out in a stretcher.”)

Of another protester, Mr. Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” In St. Louis, Mr. Trump sounded almost wistful: “Nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” About protesters in general, he said: “There used to be consequences. There are none anymore. These people are so bad for our country. You have no idea folks, you have no idea.”

Talk like this eventually finds its way into action. And so on March 10, a Trump supporter named John McGraw, was charged with assault, battery and disorderly conduct, after a protester was sucker-punched as he was being hauled by security guards out of a Trump rally in North Carolina the day before. When interviewed afterward Mr. McGraw said, “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.”

And Donald Trump’s reaction? He said he was considering paying Mr. McGraw’s legal fees. “He obviously loves his country,” Mr. Trump added, “and maybe he doesn’t like seeing what’s happening to the country.”

Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.

Mr. Trump’s comments, startling in a leading presidential candidate, have raised widespread concern about the path we find ourselves on. But concern about political violence, mob rule and unchecked passion is hardly new in American history. [Continue reading…]

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‘Trump’s relationship with Israel and the Jews is beyond fabulous,’ says former chairman of Palm Beach County Republican Party

The New York Times reports: Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and a major donor to Republican and Israeli causes, said recently that he would back Mr. Trump if he were the nominee, and a newspaper that he owns, Israel Hayom, has written favorably about Mr. Trump.

But there is still concern about Mr. Trump’s behavior, which if not anti-Semitic is at least seen by many Jews as overly accommodating of bigotry. “The way he dillydallied with David Duke basically sent a message that was perceived by many in the Jewish community as he’s looking for any votes he can get from the hard right,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, the defense lawyer.

To Mr. Dershowitz, the problem is not simply Mr. Trump; it is the white supremacists who have rallied around his candidacy. “It’s quite frightening to see who supports him,” he said.

Ms. Hicks, the campaign spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump had “disavowed David Duke and continues to strongly condemn any groups that share those hateful views.”

And for all of his critics in the Jewish world, Mr. Trump also has his supporters, including Sid Dinerstein, the former chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party in Florida.

“Donald Trump’s relationship with Israel and the Jews is beyond fabulous,” Mr. Dinerstein said, noting that his wife displayed a Trump bumper sticker on the dashboard of her Mercedes-Benz.

Mr. Dinerstein said he trusted Mr. Trump to negotiate good deals for Israel — “he only negotiates from strength, he doesn’t know anything else” — and to make sure that America “doesn’t get pushed around.”

He and his wife are hardly the lone Trump supporters in their predominantly Jewish community, he said, though not everyone is outspoken about it.

“Sometimes people come over to me and quietly say, ‘Sid, I never thought I would say this, but I’m voting for Trump,’” Mr. Dinerstein said. “And I say, ‘Everybody says that.’ ” [Continue reading…]

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The mutual dependence of Donald Trump and the news media

Jim Rutenberg writes: Did you catch the Trump-Kelly bout Friday night? What a show.

It had Donald J. Trump, The Likely Republican Presidential Nominee, throwing the first punch (of that day) at the star Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly by composing a Twitter post describing her as “overrated” and calling for a boycott of her show.

Then Fox News Channel counterpunched, accusing the candidate of having a sexist and “sick obsession” with its popular journalist. Boom. Another Trump News avalanche!

The Trump-Kelly feud once again became a focal point of the presidential campaign coverage, cascading across Twitter, cable news and digital news outlets, including this one.

As in any good prizefight, everybody came out the richer Friday, putting aside the potentially severe internal injuries.

Mr. Trump riled up his fans against a recurring villain in his running campaign narrative and ensured the news was once again all about him. Fox News, the cable news ratings leader that is so often impugned as an arm of the Republican Party, got to ring a bell for journalistic independence. Ms. Kelly got the sort of support from the network that she has described as lacking from her colleague Bill O’Reilly; guaranteed big ratings to come; and got more fodder for the book she sold for many millions of dollars after the Trump feud began.

Newspapers and online news organizations got a click-worthy story line tailor-made for a fast read on the iPhone. And, finally, there were the viewers and the readers, who are benefiting from a transitioning media industry’s desire to give them what they want, where they want it, as fast as possible. As the people have made clear, they want Trump.

It was the perfect boil-down of the disturbing symbiosis between Mr. Trump and the news media. There is always a mutually beneficial relationship between candidates and news organizations during presidential years. But in my lifetime it’s never seemed so singularly focused on a single candidacy. And the financial stakes have never been so intertwined with the journalistic and political stakes. [Continue reading…]

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Don’t rush to blame Molenbeek for harbouring Paris attacker

By Bill Tupman, University of Exeter

After 120 days on the run, Salah Abdeslam, accused of being part of the group that carried out the brutal attacks in Paris in November 2015, has finally been arrested.

He was found in the Molenbeek district of Brussels, where he lived and worked before the attacks. Despite countless police raids in recent months, Abdeslam managed to evade capture in his own neighbourhood.

In November 2015, he is suspected of being part of three well-organised groups of jihadists which attacked Paris, including bars, the Bataclan concert hall and the area around the Stade de France. They killed 130 people and most of the attackers also died.

Islamic State claimed a further attack in the 18th Arondissement which didn’t happen. It is not yet clear if this was to be carried out by Abdeslam.

He claims that he was going to blow himself up in the Stade de France, but changed his mind. One final attacker, Mohamed Abrini, remains on the run.

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The inside story of the Paris attack

CNN reports: The night that shook Paris started with three rental cars: three cars with three teams of terrorists maneuvering through the Friday evening traffic armed with the weapons of war.

A little before 9 p.m., a Renault Clio driven by Salah Abdeslam, the Paris plotter captured on Friday in Brussels, pulled up outside the national stadium. An international soccer friendly match between France and Germany was just kicking off and 80,000 fans, including French President Francois Hollande, were already inside. Three men exited the car and headed toward the stands.

One of them — Bilal Hadfi, a young French citizen living in Belgium — can be seen on surveillance video speaking into a cell phone. The other two were Iraqis who had slipped into Europe weeks before by posing as refugees. One of the trio was dressed in a Bayern Munich jogging suit. Concealed underneath their clothes were shrapnel-filled suicide vests held together with tape.

A few miles away, a black Seat Leon weaved toward the busy cafe district of Paris. The man behind the wheel, an already notorious Belgian ISIS operative called Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was on the phone speaking to Hadfi at the stadium to make sure everything went according to plan. In the passenger seats, two of his childhood friends, Chakib Akrouh and Saleh Abdeslam’s older brother, Brahim, clutched their Kalashnikovs, readying themselves. [Continue reading…]

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The Baltic elves taking on pro-Russian trolls

Michael Weiss writes from Vilnius, Lithuania: My elf was on time and surprisingly tall.

Mindaugas is an unassuming, thirtysomething advertising agency director by day, and a ferocious cyber-warrior by night. He started a phenomenon, here in Lithuania, of countering Kremlin propaganda and disinformation on the Internet. “We needed to call our group something. What to name it? Well, we were fighting trolls. So I said, ‘Let’s be elves.’”

There were 20 or 30 at first, when the trolls began a targeted campaign of leaving nasty comments about the Lithuanian government and society, usually pegged to a hatred of NATO, the European Union and, of course, the United States. Since then, elves have proliferated into the hundreds. They’re now scattered about neighboring Latvia and Estonia and have even been spotted as far north as Finland. The elves pride themselves on clandestinity and reclusiveness, and so I was quite lucky to catch this Lithuanian Legolas on my last night in Vilnius.

“Most of us were already participating in some online groups,” said this man, who suggests we call him Mindaugas in person. “Fighting the trolls on Facebook and vKontakte, giving examples of Russian lies. That’s how we met.”

Facebook is where the light skirmishes take place; the mortal combat is reserved for the comment sections of Lithuanian news articles, where the trolls loose a constant drizzle of falsehoods and complaints, each comment helping to construct an alternate reality version of life in this Baltic country of 3 million. Rather than a thriving and patriotic post-Soviet success story, which it is, the image the trolls cultivate is that of a demoralized and angry society whose people are ready for regime change, be it through internal democratic mechanisms or through “liberation” by a friendly neighboring army. [Continue reading…]

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Most Israelis see their society becoming more racist

Yael Marom writes: Over half of Israelis believe that Israel has become a more racist society over the past two years, according to a new poll published on Sunday by the Coalition Against Racism in Israel.

The poll, conducted with Israeli pollster Rafi Smith and surveyed 400 Jewish Israelis and 100 Arab citizens, was published to coincide with the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which is held annually on March 21. According to the findings, 79 percent of respondents believe that there is racism against Arabs; 77 percent claimed that there is racism against asylum seekers; 75 percent believe there is racism against Ethiopian-Israelis; 41 percent say Mizrahim (Jews with origins in Arab or Muslim countries) suffer from racism; 39 percent believe that immigrants from the former Soviet Union face discrimination; and 20 percent responded that there is racism against Ashkenazim (Jews of Eastern European ancestry).

According to the survey, 25 percent said they had personally faced racist behavior in the past year. Twenty-four percent of Israeli Jews said they personally experienced racism, as opposed to 28 percent of Arabs. Among Russian-speaking citizens, 37 percent said they experienced racism in the past year. [Continue reading…]

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Explained: How the Arab Spring led to an increasingly vicious civil war in Yemen

By Sophia Dingli, University of Hull

A missile strike on a crowded market in the northern Yemeni province of Hajja has killed dozens of civilians and injured many others. It comes almost a year after a coup by Houthi “nationalists” and the start of a Saudi-led bombing campaign, ostensibly on behalf of the Yemeni government – a devastating war that shows no signs of dissipating.

Since the bombing began in March 2015, there have been at least 3,000 civilian casualties, among them 700 children and a further 26,000 have been injured. Some 3.4m children are out of school, while 7.6m people are a step away from famine. Almost all Yemenis are in need of some form of aid.

In addition to the human casualties, 23 UNESCO heritage sites have been bombed and destroyed along with hospitals, centres for the blind, ambulances, Red Cross offices and a home for the elderly.

The war has been a brutal affair: all sides have allegedly committed war crimes. The Saudi coalition has been using banned cluster munitions manufactured in the US, while the Houthi rebels have been laying landmines. Child soldiers have been used by both the Houthis and government forces.

The world beyond the Middle East has struggled to mount an appropriate and united response to the conflict. The US and the UK have been supporting the Saudi war effort, while the EU parliament has called for an embargo on arms sales to Saudi Arabia. All attempts to form a sustainable peace building effort have been met with intransigence by the belligerents and ended in failure.

To understand why this is and to come up with some way of bringing this slaughter, misery and suffering to an end, we must revisit the root causes of the war and the factors that are still getting in the way of any sort of peace process.

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Sistani and Sadr apply increasing pressure on Iraqi government to tackle corruption

Reuters reports: With Iraq’s politicians tainted by corruption and the army’s standing hurt by battlefield defeats, two Shi’ite clerics have re-emerged as leaders in matters of state.

In their different ways, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, Iraq’s two most influential Shi’ite leaders, are pressuring Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to tackle graft at the heart of Iraq’s government.

The timing of their intervention is delicate.

If Abadi fails to satisfy Sistani and Sadr by delivering long-promised anti-corruption measures, his government may be weakened just as Iraqi forces are gearing up to fight for the largest city under Islamic State control – Mosul.

In recent weeks both clerics have increased pressure on Abadi. Sistani signaled his displeasure in January by saying his voice had “become sore” with repeating his calls for reforms. On Feb. 5, he said he would no longer deliver weekly sermons about political affairs, and he has been only addressing religious matters since.

Sadr followed up by escalating street protests.

Unlike in neighboring Iran “there is no role in the Iraqi constitution for the clerics,” said Sajad Jiyad, a Baghdad-based political analyst who advises the government. “They are playing an increasing role because the political class is discredited and no strongman can rise from the army like in the past.” [Continue reading…]

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El Niño upsets seasons and upends lives worldwide

The New York Times reports: In rural villages in Africa and Asia, and in urban neighborhoods in South America, millions of lives have been disrupted by weather linked to the strongest El Niño in a generation.

In some parts of the world, the problem has been not enough rain; in others, too much. Downpours were so bad in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, that shantytowns sprouted along city streets, filled with families displaced by floods. But farmers in India had the opposite problem: Reduced monsoon rains forced them off the land and into day-labor jobs.

In South Africa, a drought hit farmers so hard that the country, which a few years ago was exporting corn to Asian markets, now will have to buy millions of tons of it from Brazil and other South American countries.

“They will actually have to import it, which is rare,” said Rogerio Bonifacio, a climate analyst with the World Food Program, a United Nations agency. “This is a major drought.”

The World Health Organization has estimated that worldwide, El Niño-related weather is putting 60 million people at increased risk of malnutrition, water- and mosquito-borne diseases, and other illnesses. [Continue reading…]

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Killing from the conference room

David Cole writes: On March 4, the United States used drones and other aircraft to drop precision bombs on Somalia, a country with which we are not at war, reportedly killing about 150 al-Shabab militants who were said to be preparing for an imminent attack on American and African Union forces. The US government asserted that no civilians were killed, although neither that claim nor the allegation of an imminent attack could be verified. What do we really know about how American officials decide to launch such strikes?

In the last two weeks, the Obama administration has announced that it will for the first time make public a redacted version of the Presidential Policy Guidance outlining the standards for targeted killing and will also provide its own estimates of combatant and civilian deaths in drone attacks dating back to 2009. Yet much about these decisions remains opaque. In Eye in the Sky, a remarkably timely and important new film about a fictional drone strike against al-Shabab, South African director Gavin Hood offers a hypothetical window into such decision-making. The picture it paints is deeply disturbing, and raises fundamental questions about when, if ever, such attacks are justified. It may be the closest those of us on the outside ever get to the internal process behind the drone war.

In the film, Helen Mirren plays Katherine Powell, a steely British colonel charged with tracking terrorists in North Africa. The only travel Powell needs to do, however, is between her home in Surrey and her office in London, where she operates a top-secret drone program, in conjunction with American drone operators in Nevada and African agents in Kenya. As the film opens, Powell wakes to learn that a British woman, who has become a leader of al-Shabab, has been located in Nairobi along with her husband, an American citizen who is also an al-Shabab leader. What follows is a tense minute-by-minute depiction of one of the most daunting ethical and legal decisions a nation’s military and civilian leaders ever have to make—whether to kill a suspected enemy, even if innocent civilians may also die. Without taking sides, the film dramatically illustrates why technology, far from answering such questions, has only made them more difficult. [Continue reading…]

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Torturing for Trump

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Eric Fair writes: In March 2004, at Forward Operating Base St. Mere outside Falluja, Iraq, I was walking home from work. Ferdinand Ibabao, my close friend and fellow contractor, was walking with me. It had been a long day of interrogations, so we were looking forward to checking emails, and hearing about what our families were up to back home.

As we walked through a large open field on the base, the distinct sound of incoming mortar rounds interrupted our conversation. We’d been talking about finding new contracting jobs in Iraq. Conducting interrogations at places like Abu Ghraib and Falluja was beginning to take a toll. We both agreed it was time to move on to something less complicated, something that didn’t force us to set aside our humanity in order to go to work.

As the mortars detonated nearby, Ferdinand, always one to joke, ran around like a baseball player trying to catch a pop fly shouting “I got it, I got it!” He said it would be a mercy killing.

I found myself thinking about Ferdinand and his dark humor after Ted Cruz and Donald J. Trump unapologetically endorsed the use of waterboarding at a Republican debate early last month. “I’d bring back waterboarding,” Mr. Trump said, “and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”

I don’t know what drives a man to say such things. I just know that when they do, men like Ferdinand and me will be forced to shoulder the consequences.

In my role as a civilian contractor for the Department of Defense, I spent the first three months of 2004 torturing Iraqi prisoners. At the time, we were calling it enhanced interrogation, but that’s a phrase I don’t use anymore. Stress positions, slaps to the face and sleep deprivation were an outrage to the personal dignity of Iraqi prisoners. We humiliated and degraded them, and ourselves. [Continue reading…]

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