Category Archives: Analysis

Remember Sean Hannity crediting Manafort for the success of the Trump campaign?


“Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery) is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent’s position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument, which is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda.” For example:

Facebooktwittermail

Facebook’s instrumental role in the promotion of ethnic cleansing and the creation of a million refugees

Kevin Roose reports: For months, Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., has been in crisis mode, furiously attempting to contain the damage stemming from its role in last year’s presidential campaign. The company has mounted an all-out defense campaign ahead of this week’s congressional hearings on election interference in 2016, hiring three outside communications firms, taking out full-page newspaper ads, and mobilizing top executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, to beat back accusations that it failed to prevent Russia from manipulating the outcome of the election.

No other predicament in Facebook’s 13-year history has generated this kind of four-alarm response. But while the focus on Russia is understandable, Facebook has been much less vocal about the abuse of its services in other parts of the world, where the stakes can be much higher than an election.

This past week, my colleagues at The Times reported on the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, an ethnic minority in Myanmar that has been subjected to brutal violence and mass displacement. Violence against the Rohingya has been fueled, in part, by misinformation and anti-Rohingya propaganda spread on Facebook, which is used as a primary news source by many people in the country. Doctored photos and unfounded rumors have gone viral on Facebook, including many shared by official government and military accounts.

The information war in Myanmar illuminates a growing problem for Facebook. The company successfully connected the world to a constellation of real-time communication and broadcasting tools, then largely left it to deal with the consequences.

“In a lot of these countries, Facebook is the de facto public square,” said Cynthia Wong, a senior internet researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Because of that, it raises really strong questions about Facebook needing to take on more responsibility for the harms their platform has contributed to.”

In Myanmar, the rise in anti-Rohingya sentiment coincided with a huge boom in social media use that was partly attributable to Facebook itself. In 2016, the company partnered with MTP, the state-run telecom company, to give subscribers access to its Free Basics program. Free Basics includes a limited suite of internet services, including Facebook, that can be used without counting toward a cellphone data plan. As a result, the number of Facebook users in Myanmar has skyrocketed to more than 30 million today from 2 million in 2014. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘The Russians have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations’

Susan B Glasser writes: America’s former top spymaster has a few things he’d like to clear up about the Russia investigation.

James Clapper, a crusty ex-cargo pilot who rose through the Air Force ranks and retired as director of national intelligence in January, only to emerge publicly as one of President Donald Trump’s foremost critics, wants you to know that no matter how much Trump rants about the “Russia hoax,” the 2016 hacking was not only real and aimed at electing Trump but constituted a major victory for a dangerous foreign adversary. “The Russians,” he said, have “succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.”

Far from being the “witch hunt” Trump has repeatedly called it, the investigation of whether Trump’s team colluded with Russia constitutes a “cloud not only over the president, but the office of the presidency, the administration, the government and the country” until it is resolved, Clapper told me in an extensive new interview for The Global Politico, our weekly podcast on world affairs.

And yes, Clapper is sticking with his view that the allegations are “worse than Watergate,” given that the Russiagate investigation involves “a foreign adversary actively and aggressively and directly engaging in our political processes to interfere with them and to undermine our system, whereas in Watergate you were dealing with a two-bit petty burglary, domestic only.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How a master grifter taught the FBI to crack open the art of the deal

Christopher Dickey writes: David Howard’s Chasing Phil tells the story of two young FBI agents who go undercover in the 1970s to expose a relatively minor con and get taken in, in every sense, by one of the great grifters of the last century, a master of multi-million-dollar scams involving multiple offshore banks—some of them legit, some of them shells—and a collection of accomplices around the world.

Back then, the bureaucrats at tbe Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in D.C., just recently free of J. Edgar Hoover, but still in his mold, really didn’t like this kind of undercover operation. They wanted to nail commies and Dillingers, not guys in suits with global connections in high finance. But the young agents, who to their amazement were accepted as apprentice con-men, kept jumping on planes to Hawaii and Geneva, Hong Kong, the Bahamas and Frankfurt with their new buddy Phil Kitzer. Eventually, they were having a ball, and they might well have wondered where their loyalties lay (althought they insisted they always knew).

As Chasing Phil sketches the multiple layers of fraud in multi-million-dollar cons and describes the personality of Phil Kitzer, the central scam artist, one can’t help but think of another man who still likes to brag about “the art of the deal”:
“Phil was hard to read, partly because he was a skilled, habitual liar. He lied to con his marks, of course, but in the past seven weeks they’d watched him fib to just about everyone else—including them. … If he didn’t want to go outside, he would say that it was raining [even if it wasn’t]. He routinely offered letters of credit for 10 percent of face value, and after a client agreed, he would say he’d calculated wrong and jack the price up another few thousand dollars. One of his mottos was, Don’t tell the truth if you can avoid it.”

But Kitzer had a lot more class and a lot more charm than Donald Trump, and to the extent there is a link between the two, it is the fact that without Kitzer and the agents pursuing him, the FBI would have taken a lot longer to develop the expertise in fraud and finance that now is central to the Trump investigations headed by Robert Mueller, a former FBI director. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump team drawing up fresh plans to bolster U.S. nuclear arsenal and widen opportunities for its use

The Guardian reports: The Trump administration is working on a nuclear weapons policy that is intended to mark a decisive end to the era of post-cold war disarmament, by bolstering the US arsenal and loosening the conditions under which it would be used.

A draft of the new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) was presented in September at a White House meeting between Donald Trump and his top national security advisers. Congress and US allies have been briefed on the progress of the new draft.

The document is still being debated with a target for completion by the end of this year or the beginning of next. Among the new elements under consideration are a low yield ballistic missile intended primarily to deter Russia’s use of a small nuclear weapon in a war over the Baltic states; a sea-launched cruise missile; a change in language governing conditions in which the US would use nuclear weapons; and investments aimed at reducing the time it would take the US to prepare a nuclear test.

Trump has frequently voiced his intention to build up the US arsenal. According to one report, he was outraged at a meeting with military leaders in July when he was shown a downward sloping graph of the US weapons stockpile since the cold war, and had to be talked out of ordering a tenfold increase.

The White House denied the report but it has repeatedly made clear it aims to adopt a more aggressive nuclear stance.

“You can … be assured that our administration is committed to strengthen and modernise America’s nuclear deterrent,” Mike Pence, the vice-president, said on Friday on a morale-boosting visit to Minot air force base in North Dakota, home to Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles and B-52 strategic bombers.

“History attests the surest path to peace is through American strength. There’s no greater element of American strength, there’s no greater force for peace in the world than the United States nuclear arsenal.”

Like much else about Trump’s presidency, the new policy is aimed at erasing the legacy of his predecessor. Barack Obama began his administration with a major speech in Prague in April 2009, committing the US to disarmament and the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons globally.

A year after the speech, the US and Russia signed the New Start agreement, restricting both sides to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and bombs, down by about 30% from previously agreed limits.

However, the “Prague agenda” petered out. Aspirations to cut the strategic stockpile by another third, unilaterally if necessary, were abandoned in the face of congressional resistance, North Korea’s growing nuclear weapons programme and worsening relations with Russia. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Refusing Weinstein’s hush money, Rose McGowan calls out Hollywood

The New York Times reports: In late September, just as multiple women were days away from going on the record with reports of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, one of his alleged assault victims, Rose McGowan, considered an offer that suggested just how desperate the Hollywood producer had become.

Ms. McGowan, who was working on a memoir called “Brave,” had spoken privately over the years about a 1997 hotel room encounter with Mr. Weinstein and hinted at it publicly. Through her lawyer, she said, someone close to Mr. Weinstein offered her hush money: $1 million, in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement.

In 1997, Ms. McGowan had reached a $100,000 settlement with Mr. Weinstein, but that agreement, she learned this summer, had never included a confidentiality clause. Ms. McGowan, who was most widely known for her role as a witch on the WB show “Charmed,” had recently developed a massive following as a fiery feminist on Twitter, but she was now, at 44, a multimedia artist, no longer acting, her funds depleted by health care costs for her father, who died eight years ago.

“I had all these people I’m paying telling me to take it so that I could fund my art,” Ms. McGowan said in an interview. She responded by asking for $6 million, part counteroffer, part slow torture of her former tormentor, she said. “I figured I could probably have gotten him up to three,” she said. “But I was like — ew, gross, you’re disgusting, I don’t want your money, that would make me feel disgusting.” [Continue reading…]

Ronan Farrow reports: In March, Annabella Sciorra, who received an Emmy nomination for her role in “The Sopranos,” agreed to talk with me for a story I was reporting about Harvey Weinstein. Speaking by phone, I explained that two sources had told me that she had a serious allegation regarding the producer. Sciorra, however, told me that Weinstein had never done anything inappropriate. Perhaps she just wasn’t his type, she said, with an air of what seemed to be studied nonchalance. But, two weeks ago, after The New Yorker published the story, in which thirteen women accused Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment, Sciorra called me. The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She was still living in fear of him, and slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she told me, had violently raped her in the early nineteen-nineties, and, over the next several years, sexually harassed her repeatedly.

“I was so scared. I was looking out the window of my living room, and I faced the water of the East River,” she said, recalling our initial conversation. “I really wanted to tell you. I was like, ‘This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life. . . .’ ” she said. “I really, really panicked,” she added. “I was shaking. And I just wanted to get off the phone.”

All told, more than fifty women have now levelled accusations against Weinstein, in accounts published by the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other outlets. But many other victims have continued to be reluctant to talk to me about their experiences, declining interview requests or initially agreeing to talk and then wavering. As more women have come forward, the costs of doing so have certainly shifted. But many still say that they face overwhelming pressures to stay silent, ranging from the spectre of career damage to fears about the life-altering consequences of being marked as sexual-assault victims. “Now when I go to a restaurant or to an event, people are going to know that this happened to me,” Sciorra said. “They’re gonna look at me and they’re gonna know. I’m an intensely private person, and this is the most unprivate thing you can do.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Will Congress ever limit the forever-expanding 9/11 war?

The New York Times reports: A Navy SEAL, killed alongside civilians in a January raid on a village in Yemen. Another SEAL, killed while accompanying Somali forces on a May raid. And now four Army soldiers, dead in an ambush this month in Niger.

These American combat deaths — along with those of about 10 service members killed this year in Afghanistan and Iraq — underscore how a law passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has been stretched to permit open-ended warfare against Islamist militant groups scattered across the Muslim world.

The law, commonly called the A.U.M.F., on its face provided congressional authorization to use military force only against nations, groups or individuals responsible for the attacks. But while the specific enemy lawmakers were thinking about in September 2001 was the original Al Qaeda and its Taliban host in Afghanistan, three presidents of both parties have since invoked the 9/11 war authority to justify battle against Islamist militants in many other places.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson will testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as lawmakers renew a debate over whether they should update and replace that law, revitalizing Congress’s constitutionally assigned role of making fundamental decisions about going to war.

But even as the Trump administration moves to ease some Obama-era constraints on counterterrorism operations, political obstacles to reaching a consensus on new parameters for a war authorization law look more daunting than ever. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Canning O’Reilly and other media men won’t change a thing. Here’s what would

Margaret Sullivan writes: So, now that the dam has burst on sexual misconduct at media companies, we’re good, right?

Don’t believe that for a moment.

The appalling behavior that’s been in the headlines for weeks isn’t going to stop just because some high-profile men have fallen from grace.

Yes, maybe, after this month of eye-popping revelations about influential media figures such as Bill O’Reilly, Mark Halperin and Leon Wieseltier, news organizations will do a better job of taking internal complaints seriously. For a while.

And maybe high-powered men will keep their pants zipped and their hands to themselves so that they won’t lose their positions atop the totem pole. For a time.

The revelations do matter. But something deeper — more difficult — has to happen, too.

Media companies have to address the deep-seated gender inequality that’s at the root of this mess.

“It shouldn’t be forgotten that sexual harassment is often more about abuse of power than sex,” wrote former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who with journalist Jane Mayer chronicled Anita Hill’s sexual harassment claims against Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings in their book, “Strange Justice.”

When Abramson was top Times editor — the first woman to hold that coveted post — she promoted talented, qualified women so that half of her “masthead” was female. Good thing she moved fast; Abramson was fired after less than three years.

That kind of equity makes a difference. Having a critical mass of women decision-makers, rather than a token presence, allows ideas to bubble up and voices to be heard in new ways. This is, of course, true for racial diversity, too.

It’s rare, though — and not just in media-management ranks. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Russia is furious. That means the sanctions are working

Anne Applebaum writes: In yet another display of spitting fury, the Russian state this week put Bill Browder on the Interpol list, an international register of “most wanted” criminals. This was the fifth time Russia had issued an international arrest warrant for Browder, a businessman who once worked in the country. Wearily, Interpol lifted the warrant on Thursday. But the gesture once again confirmed something few have yet acknowledged: The sanctions on Russia are working.

Browder’s real “crime”? He persuaded another government, this time the Canadians, to pass a “Magnitsky Act,” a bill applying sanctions on Russian tax officials and police involved in a vast scam, one that involved changing the names of companies, hijacking their bank accounts and using them to steal money from the Russian state. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, discovered the scam. He was investigated and imprisoned, beaten and deprived of medical care until he died. Ever since, Browder has crusaded to punish those responsible by depriving them of access to Western banks, Western vacation homes and Western educations for their children.

As I’ve argued before, the Russian government really, really hates the Magnitsky sanctions, and it hates them with disproportionate fury. Recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, jeered at Browder during a news conference. The Russian lawyer who met with Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 — the one whose fixer dangled the tantalizing offer of “official documents and information that would incriminate” Hillary Clinton — was seeking to have the Magnitsky sanctions lifted, too. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

National Weather Service ‘on the brink of failure’ due to job vacancies, says union

The Hill reports: The National Weather Service (NWS) is dealing with hundreds of vacant positions in the wake of a series of extreme weather events that have plagued the U.S.

“The National Weather Service … for the first time in its history is close to teetering on the brink of failure,” the NWS’s labor union, the NWS Employees Organization, said in a statement earlier this week.

The union went on to slam NWS leadership, saying it “has been incapable of placing their budget priorities correctly, spending money on Management conferences and blended models rather than on filling the nearly 700 vacant forecast positions.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Tired by years of separatist strife, many Basques wary of new independence bid

The New York Times reports: Deep in the hills of the Basque region, in northern Spain, Luis Iriondo tapped a bridge with his walking stick.

Mr. Iriondo, 95, is one of the last survivors of a notorious assault on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. He was 14 when German bombers fighting for Gen. Francisco Franco reduced this town, for centuries a sacred symbol of Basque identity, to rubble.

And it was somewhere beneath this bridge that Mr. Iriondo, more than 80 years ago, sheltered during the attack.

Franco won the war and ended Basque self-government, which did not return until 1979, after Franco’s death. Though Mr. Iriondo still hopes for greater autonomy for the region, he does not want Basque separatists to follow their counterparts in Catalonia, whose parliament voted on Friday to secede from Spain, prompting the Spanish government to take administrative control of Catalonia hours later.

“All my life, all I have had on my mind is war,” Mr. Iriondo said. “So what I look forward to is peace and unity.”

If the pollsters are right, his position is not uncommon among the Basques of Spain. As the secession crisis in Catalonia deepens, attention has turned to the northern Basque region — which, like Catalonia, has its own language, culture and long history of separatism — to see if the desire for independence proves contagious.

Until the 19th century, Spanish kings swore an oath to respect Basque autonomy underneath a tree here in Guernica. But the region’s self-government was dismantled in 1876, and so it remained (barring a brief period of autonomy during the Spanish Civil War) for more than a century.

Even after its restoration, self-government was still not enough for some Basques — including a militant group, ETA, which killed more than 800 civilians, policemen and soldiers in a decades-long campaign for independence that formally ended this year.

But despite this tortured history, or perhaps because of it, the Catalan crisis does not appear to have markedly increased the zeal for Basque independence. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Kerala: One of the few places where a communist can still dream

The Washington Post reports: On a recent morning in southern India, one of the world’s last true-believing communists rose to speak in a place where communists can still whip up the masses and win elections.

Thomas Isaac, the finance minister for the state of Kerala, gazed out at a crowd of hundreds who had gathered to honor the founding father of Kerala’s Communist Party, a man killed by a snakebite while organizing farmworkers whose dying words were reputed to have been: “Comrades, forward!”

A row of hammer and sickle flags fluttered in the wind. People raised clenched fists in a “red salute” and chanted “Long live the revolution!”

“We are trying to build our dream state in this fascist India!” Isaac began, and in so many ways it was still true.

A century after Bolsheviks swarmed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Russia (now St. Petersburg), the Indian state of Kerala, home to 35 million people, remains one of the few places on earth where a communist can still dream.

The Bolsheviks, inspired by Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” had set out to build a new kind of society, a workers’ paradise in which property and wealth would be owned in common. That revolution began in the fall of 1917 and gave rise to the Soviet Union and a movement that would sweep across one-third of the world, inspiring new followers, erasing borders and filling gulags. Eventually, it would be undone by stagnant economies, pressure from the West and the alienation of its own people.

What remains today are five nominally communist nations. In Cuba, the revolution survives mostly as a decrepit museum piece. The communist parties of China, Vietnam and Laos preside over largely autocratic forms of runaway capitalism. In North Korea, communism has become a nuclear-armed cult of personality and police state.

But in Kerala — far from the high-stakes maneuvers of the Cold War and nearly 2,000 miles from the Indian capital of New Delhi — history has taken the most unexpected of detours. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Unpacking Uranium One: Hype and law

Paul Rosenzweig writes: The latest instance of “what-aboutism” is the House Republican decision to open an investigation of the Uranium One transaction—the allegation that Hillary Clinton transferred control of 20% of America’s uranium mining output to a Russian company, in exchange for substantial contributions to the Clinton Foundation from the executives of that same Russian company. Perhaps fearing future revelations of Trump’s closeness to Russia, the evident purpose of the investigation is to establish a “Hillary too” counterpoint. Based on what is currently in the public record, little, if anything about the allegation is plausible. In this post, I want to summarize the legal context and known facts regarding the transfer and put the allegations of impropriety in context. (I focus exclusively on the transfer and the U.S. government’s approval of it. I am not, in this post, considering the evidence—such as it is—of donations to the Clinton Foundation. My reasoning is simple: if there is no “quo” to be given, the question of a “quid” is moot.) [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Nuclear dangers from North Korea: Managing the risks to the U.S. and Russia

Joshua H. Pollack writes: Among the most disturbing aspects of the North Korean nuclear problem today is the lack of a common perspective between Washington and Moscow. More than any other government, Russian authorities have been reluctant to acknowledge the emergence of a genuine nuclear and missile threat from North Korea to the United States. This perceptual gap is more than a mere irritant. Without corrective actions, it poses a grave danger to the United States and Russia alike, one that goes well beyond a handful of North Korean nuclear bombs.

For their own reasons, the North Koreans are irked by Russian attitudes. Returning from a recent official visit to Pyongyang, Russian lawmaker Anton Morozov said that senior North Korean officials had shared some news with his delegation: They are preparing another flight-test of a missile capable of reaching the mainland United States. He said that the North Koreans had explained the capabilities of the missile in some detail, describing its range and reentry technology, as well as the technology to “control” the warhead, a possible reference to guidance systems. All three points have come into question at various times.

No reason for this unusual presentation was given, but there is a likely explanation. Russian leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, have so far insisted that North Korea’s pair of flight-tests in July 2017 did not demonstrate an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with the ability to reach North America. In taking this stance, the Russians have slighted the North Koreans and given them a desire to disabuse Moscow of the idea. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Puerto Rico is burning its dead, and we may never know how many people the hurricane really killed

BuzzFeed reports: Funeral directors and crematoriums are being permitted by the Puerto Rican government to burn the bodies of people who died as a result of Hurricane Maria — without those people being counted in the official death toll.

The result is a massive loophole likely suppressing the official death count, which has become a major indicator of how the federal government’s relief efforts are going because President Trump himself made it one.

During Trump’s photo-op visit to the US territory — whose residents are US citizens — three weeks ago, he boasted that the death toll was just 16. It doubled by the time he returned to Washington that same day. The death toll is now at 51, a figure widely contradicted by what funeral homes, crematoriums, and hospitals on the ground tell BuzzFeed News.

Then, last week, when asked how he would rate the White House’s response to the crisis, Trump said, “I’d say it was a 10.” More than a month after the storm made landfall on Sept. 20, 2.6 million people are without power, at least 875,000 people don’t have access to running water, and 66% of the island still doesn’t have cell service. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

World’s witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires’ wealth swells to $6tn

The Guardian reports: The world’s super-rich hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the US Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century, when families like the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts controlled vast fortunes.

Billionaires increased their combined global wealth by almost a fifth last year to a record $6tn (£4.5tn) – more than twice the GDP of the UK. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multi-millionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, according to the UBS / PwC Billionaires report.

Josef Stadler, the lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients were concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Will anyone protect the Rohingya?

By Vincent A. Auger, Western Illinois University

Since August, the Rohingya, an ethnic minority in Myanmar, has faced what a United Nations official called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Recent reports describe a campaign by Myanmar security forces to drive the Rohingya from the country permanently. Hundreds of thousands have fled to camps in neighboring Bangladesh, creating a new refugee crisis.

This is exactly the type of atrocity that the United Nations vowed to combat in 2005, when it asserted a “responsibility to protect” civilian populations from genocidal violence. Yet, little has been done.

Why has “the responsibility to protect” failed, and can the Rohingya be helped?

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail