Category Archives: Analysis

The case for Hillary Clinton, by a Bernie voter

Sally Kohn writes: During the early moments of the Democratic primary, my 7-year-old daughter Willa declared that she wanted Hillary Clinton to win “because she’s a girl.”

“That’s not enough of a reason,” I almost said, but then caught myself. For 270 years, maleness and whiteness was an implicit prerequisite for president. Wanting to vote for a woman candidate isn’t sexist; it’s an act of undoing sexism. It’s a way to symbolically support the equality of women everywhere while substantively putting into office a candidate who personally understands the needs of half of the population who have heretofore not been represented in the White House. That’s not to say that voting for a woman is an implicitly feminist act (see Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina), nor is it to suggest that not voting for a woman is an inherently, entirely sexist decision. But our democracy has always been inextricably entwined with race and gender. We only notice it when the candidate isn’t a white man.

Women make up more than 50 percent of the American population but just 20 percent of Congress — which, incidentally, is the highest percentage of women in Congress in history. Since the United States Senate was established in 1789, there have been just 46 women senators — 20 of whom are currently serving. There has been just one African American woman senator in the entire 227 years of the institution.

India elected a woman head of state. Liberia elected a woman head of state. So did Britain and Israel and Germany and South Korea and Indonesia. Our supposedly inclusive, equitable democracy has never managed to do what Bangladesh and Chile have done. Now, we finally have a chance.

On Tuesday evening, when it became clear that Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee, I looked at my daughter and my eyes filled with tears. She will grow up in a world that is still imperfect, still bending toward justice, but with markedly more opportunity and fairness than my grandmother ever knew. And my little girl, who once looked at the faces of the 44 presidents so far and asked why none are women, may now know not only that the world can change but that there can be a place for a girl like her at the top of it. [Continue reading…]

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Canada is the least xenophobic country in the Western world. Here’s why

Zack Beauchamp writes: While most of the Western world is seeing a surge in nativism and Islamophobia, the Canadian government has become more and more open to minority groups and immigration.

“The only real outlier [to the nativist trend] is Canada,” Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia who studies nativism and far-right politics in Europe, tells me. He continues:

[Trudeau] has handled, so far, the Syrian refugee crisis incredibly well, having taken in 25,000 Syrian refugees against the majority will. Initially, he wasn’t supported by the majority — but when they finally arrived, a majority of Canadians did support it. That’s one of the few encouraging lessons that we have seen over the last several years: that if you have a positive campaign, which is supported by a large portion of the media, that you can actually swing public opinion in a positive direction.

Why? It’s because Canada is genuinely different from other Western countries in terms of its attitude toward immigrants. It’s far more welcoming than basically everywhere else.

“Compared to the citizens of other developed immigrant-receiving countries, Canadians are by far the most open to and optimistic about immigration,” Irene Bloemraad, a sociologist at UC Berkeley and its chair of Canadian studies, wrote in a 2012 study published by the Migration Policy Institute.

“In one comparative poll, only 27 percent of those surveyed in Canada agreed that immigration represented more of a problem than an opportunity. In the country that came closest to Canadian opinion, France, the perception of immigration as a problem was significantly higher, at 42 percent.”

Why? According to Bloemraad, the Canadian government has spent decades attempting to foster tolerance and acceptance as core national values, through policies aimed at integrating immigrants and minority groups without stripping them of their group identity. [Continue reading…]

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A desperate woman’s email from Iraq reveals the high toll of Obama’s low-cost wars

The Washington Post reports: On small video screens inside their cockpits, the U.S. pilots spotted their target, an Islamic State checkpoint just south of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

In grainy black and white, they could see the enemy manning the barricades and a guard shack. As they prepared to launch their attack, the pilots noticed a potential complication: Two cars approached the checkpoint and stopped. The drivers appeared to be talking with Islamic State fighters.

Other cars moved through the checkpoint, but these two vehicles remained on the side of the road. Five minutes passed. Then 10. Nearly 40 minutes had gone by and the two vehicles still had not moved.

Running low on fuel and time, the pilots concluded that the people in the cars were allied with the militants and asked for permission to strike. After a brief discussion with their headquarters in Qatar, they got their reply: “You’re cleared to execute.”

This was one version of what war had become in the last years of the Obama administration: The pilots made two strafing runs over the checkpoint, their machine guns cutting through the two cars. Then they unleashed a 500-pound satellite-guided bomb that engulfed the area in dust, fire and deadly shrapnel.

As they returned to their base, the pilots offered an in-flight assessment of their mission: guard shack flattened, two vehicles destroyed and four enemy fighters dead. “There are no apparent civilian or other collateral concerns,” their report concluded.

The first sign that they had made a horrible mistake came in the form of an email, sent two weeks after the March 2015 airstrike, to an Iraqi citizen working at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

“I am Raja’a Zidan al-Ekabee . . . ” the email began. [Continue reading…]

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Bashar Assad’s defiance points to a Syrian peace effort in tatters

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Michele Kelemen reports: Syrian President Bashar Assad is sounding rather confident these days. In his first major address in the past two months, he promised that his troops will reclaim “every inch” of Syrian territory.

“We have no other choice but to be victorious,” Assad told Syria’s parliament on Tuesday. He also lashed out at rebels, blaming them for the failure of peace talks backed by the United Nations.

Assad’s speech is calling into question international diplomacy on Syria. One Syria-watcher at the Atlantic Council in Washington, Faysal Itani, says it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

“It is safe to say [the peace effort] has failed,” Itani tells NPR, saying he never thought the prospects for diplomacy were good.

The diplomatic plan relied on Russia and Iran using their influence with Assad to encourage him to agree on a transitional government and make peace with more moderate rebels.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, one of the key architects of this approach, was “trying to pull a rabbit out of his hat,” according to Itani. While Kerry was seeking concessions from Assad, the military balance of power was turning in favor of the Syrian regime.

“The Russians are quite committed to ensuring it stays that way. No one has any incentive to give John Kerry what he’s asking for,” Itani says. [Continue reading…]

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Can victories against ISIS last without support of Sunnis?

Yaroslav Trofimov writes: Two years after Islamic State launched its blitzkrieg on Iraq, exploiting Sunni Arab grievances there and in neighboring Syria, the militant group is steadily losing ground in both countries.

But, instead of local Sunnis reclaiming their lands, forces dominated by other communities — Iraq’s Shiite militias, Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, and the Alawite-run Syrian regime — are inflicting these defeats.

On the only occasion where Sunni Arab rebels attempted a major offensive against Islamic State in recent months, in Syria’s northern Aleppo countryside along Turkey’s border, it ended in a rout and a further loss of territory — partially reversed this week — to the self-proclaimed caliphate.

All of this raises a question: How meaningful are the recent victories if the root cause behind the emergence of Islamic State remains, and as more Sunni towns such as Fallujah become devastated by the fighting?

Fallujah seemed largely pacified following the campaign against al Qaeda in Iraq a decade ago — only to succumb to Sunni Islamist extremists again as the Shiite-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad turned to sectarian repression.

“We could be looking at a Groundhog Day scenario,” warns Brian Katulis, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank close to the Democrats. “The campaign seems to be going well militarily, but it may have extreme costs in the long run. The biggest risk is the re-emergence of radicalism in a few short months, or year or two.”

So far, the few areas repopulated by Sunni Arabs, such as the city of Tikrit, have remained largely peaceful — in part because they are still garrisoned by Shiite militias, with relatives of suspected Islamic State members banned from returning. As more towns become liberated in Iraq and Syria, however, exercising that kind of control will be harder.

A backlash in those areas against victorious Shiites or Kurds would allow Islamic State to keep recruiting new fighters and bombers for a renewed insurgency, warns Robert Ford, a scholar at the Middle East Institute who served as U.S. ambassador in Syria and deputy envoy in Iraq.

“If that happens, the fight against Islamic State doesn’t end, it just morphs into a different kind of battle — and the terrorist threat to the West doesn’t go away,” he says. [Continue reading…]

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The global impact of transnational criminal cartels

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Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán and Luis Jorge Garay-Salamanca report: In the early morning hours of Friday, January 8, 2016, Mexican marines closed in on the world’s most wanted man: Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, a notorious drug trafficker with a net worth estimated near $1 billion. The climactic shootout in Sinaloa, Mexico, took place after Guzmán made a getaway into the sewer system from a house that the authorities had been watching. He was finally apprehended after he reemerged and stole a car. His capture brought to a close six months of humiliation for the Mexican government, which had struggled to explain how Guzmán could escape from a maximum-security prison by walking into the shower, under full view of a video camera, and slipping away through a tiny hole in the floor that led to a 30-foot-deep, mile-long tunnel that had taken perhaps a year to construct. It was the second time that El Chapo had broken out of prison under the noses of Mexican officials. Mexican officials are currently debating whether to hold Guzmán — really, whether they can hold him or — extradite him to the United States, where he faces indictments in multiple federal courts on drug trafficking and murder charges. His organization, the Sinaloa cartel, has smuggled vast quantities of drugs into the United States through elaborate tunnel systems near the border between the two countries.

In Mexico, the confrontation between cartels such as Sinaloa, Los Zetas, and Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) has cost nearly 44,000 lives during the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto. Human rights organizations counted more than 100,000 deaths during the tenure of Nieto’s predecessor. These and other criminal networks originating in Mexico pay bribes and co-opt police chiefs, mayors, local legislators, and municipal and state police. They infiltrate state institutions, such as courts and attorney offices, especially at the local level, spreading corruption and violence across the country. Though usually defined as “Mexican drug cartels,” they don’t confine their operations to Mexico or their activities to drug trafficking. They extort, kidnap, and murder across Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Los Zetas has perpetrated mass murders in Guatemala, while members of Sinaloa operate in Colombia and Venezuela.

As the United States’ interest in extraditing Guzmán shows, the impact of these activities is often felt beyond Latin America. In 2012, the U.S. Justice Department’s Criminal Division pointed out that at least $881 million in proceeds from drug trafficking, some of which involved Sinaloa in Mexico and the Norte del Valle cartel in Colombia, had been laundered through HSBC Bank USA, without being detected. A U.S. district court requested extradition of former Guatemalan president Alfonso Portillo in 2013, and convicted him in 2014, for laundering millions of dollars through American bank accounts with the help of Jorge Armando Llort, whom he had appointed director of a semi-state-owned bank, Banco de Crédito Hipotecario Nacional. No Guatemalan courts sentenced the bank’s director or the former president.

What few observers realize is that, while El Chapo’s capture made for a dramatic story, the criminal operations of his Sinaloa cartel will proceed almost as if nothing happened. In his notorious Rolling Stone interview with Sean Penn, El Chapo observed: “The day I don’t exist, it’s not going to decrease in any way at all. Drug trafficking does not depend on just one person.”

Sinaloa and other criminal cartels have evolved structures that no longer depend on the direction of single leaders. They have become transnational criminal networks — enormous, decentralized, and difficult to map and control. Their operations, too, have become more varied, not only in their criminal activities but in their infiltration and co-optation of legal entities, including government and law enforcement. Even in some countries with strong rule-of-law traditions, they have overcome judicial systems, reconfigured state institutions, and influenced formal democratic processes. [Continue reading…]

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How to run a Russian hacking ring

Kaveh Waddell writes: A man with intense eyes crouches over a laptop in a darkened room, his face and hands hidden by a black ski mask and gloves. The scene is lit only by the computer screen’s eerie glow.

Exaggerated portraits of malicious hackers just like this keep popping up in movies and TV, despite the best efforts of shows like Mr. Robot to depict hackers in a more realistic way. Add a cacophony of news about data breaches that have shaken the U.S. government, taken entire hospital systems hostage, and defrauded the international banking system, and hackers start to sound like omnipotent super-villains.

But the reality is, as usual, less dramatic. While some of the largest cyberattacks have been the work of state-sponsored hackers — the OPM data breach that affected millions of Americans last year, for example, or the Sony hack that revealed Hollywood’s intimate secrets​ — the vast majority of the world’s quotidian digital malice comes from garden-variety hackers.

And for many of those cybercriminals, hacking is as unglamorous as any other business. That’s what a group of security researchers found when they infiltrated a ring of hackers based in Russia earlier this year, and monitored its dealings over the course of five months.

The researchers were with Flashpoint, an American cybersecurity company that investigates threats on the dark and deep web. Their undercover operation began when they came across a post on a Russian hacker forum on the dark web — a part of the internet that’s inaccessible to regular browsers — that read very much like a get-rich-quick ad you might find on Facebook. [Continue reading…]

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Tilting at algorithms in Bernieland

Jeremy Stahl writes: Around 10:30 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, a triumphant Hillary Clinton offered her defeated Democratic presidential primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders an olive branch. “Let there be no mistake: Sen. Sanders, his campaign, and the vigorous debates that we’ve had about how to raise incomes, reduce inequality, and increase upward mobility have been very good for the Democratic Party and for America,” she told the crowd of supporters at Brooklyn’s Navy Yard as she celebrated becoming the first woman to head a major party ticket in American history.

Three hours later and roughly 2,500 miles away, out came Sanders himself, introduced to a crowd of a few thousand supporters at the Barker Hangar as “the next president of the United States.” To roaring applause, he promised to “take our fight” to the July Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. He closed his speech with the mantra “the struggle continues.”

What he meant by this promise was unclear. I think I know what some of his dead-enders heard, however. “Without all this rigging he would have won already,” said Heather Kim, a schoolteacher and member of a Koreans for Sanders California group. “We all know, she’s stolen the vote, her and the media,” Linda Bassett chimed in.

When confronted with the sheer unlikelihood of fraud being perpetrated on that scale and with the margin of victory, which had climbed to about 3.5 million votes by the end of the night, the women remained credulous. “I don’t put it past them,” Bassett said. “When it goes to be counted, they’ve got all those computerized machines. We know that there’s algorithms.” A third member of this crew — all in their late 50s or early 60s — concurred. “I was there in 2004 in Ohio, I know the shit they pull,” Margie Hoyt said, seeming to nod to accusations of vote machine tampering by Republicans during that election. [Continue reading…]

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A racist presidential candidate for a racist party

Andrew Rosenthal writes: When Donald Trump attacked a federal judge whose parents were born in Mexico, Hispanic Americans were outraged. Other minority groups saw a pattern of bigotry. Democrats had a hard time concealing their glee. Republican leaders pretended they disapproved.

Well, to be fair, they did disapprove in a way — not because Trump believes the things he says, but because he says them so directly.

Far too many Republicans share this kind of racism and have for a long time. Trump has just dispensed with dog whistles and revels in his bigotry instead. But this is the party the Republicans have been deliberately and assiduously building for many decades, the party of division and intolerance. George H.W. Bush’s racist tactics in 1988 against Michael Dukakis — the Willie Horton ad in particular — seem almost genteel by comparison.

Today’s Republicans have stymied every effort at reforming immigration, at achieving true equality for women, at ending the scourge of racist drug laws and criminal sentencing rules. The Republican Party has generated a wave of laws designed to make it harder for black Americans and other minorities to vote. It’s not that Republicans don’t want to deport millions of Mexicans and ban Muslims from our shores. They just don’t like to talk about it in the open. [Continue reading…]

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England not Britain is driving the Brexit referendum

Anthony Barnett writes: Less than a month before the vote and polls suggest the outcome of the referendum might be Brexit. Why? I want to point the finger at my own kind: the progressive, well-educated, middle class, Europe-loving, opinion makers, 91% of whom, if you are Guardian-readers like me want to stay in the EU. Yes, my kin and kind, it is your fault that a Brexit result you so abhor is even possible. Like a bad cyclist who stares at the large, wild-looking dog they are trying to avoid and therefore steers into it, the English nation that alarms you so much is now giving you a well deserved bite up the bum. You should have befriended it.

Whatever the result of the referendum, whether it is a healthy majority for Remain, a narrow one, or a vote to Leave, the heart of the matter is that England has to have its own parliament. What the referendum reveals is that England both monopolises and is imprisoned by British Westminster and its culture of ‘to the victor the spoils’. To escape from this England is embracing Brexit because no other solution is on offer. It may be intimidated into remaining in the EU through fear of the economic consequences. But England’s frustrated desire for democracy has turned it against the EU rather than the real culprit, the British state.

Although a long fruitless succession of calls for England to ‘awake’ should warn off any further attempts, mine has three parts, each in a different tone. First, sociological, showing that England is the force behind the referendum. Second, subjective, highlighting the nature of Englishness. Third, political, arguing that action has to be taken to represent England fairly in all its glorious polyphony.

A recent ICM online poll has England showing Remain 43% with Leave on 44% and undecided 12%. Telephone polls have shown a significant lead for Remain, which the betting says is still the likely outcome on 23rd June. The reason that I’m bothering with an uncertain statistic is that this one allows comparison with Scotland where there is certainty. North of the border the same poll shows Remain is on 59% and Leave 28%, also with 12% undecided. The majority for Remain in Scotland is already more than twice as large as the ‘don’t knows’. This is reflected in its politicians. In Edinburgh Allan Little reports for the BBC, “It is striking how little high-profile support there is for Brexit in Scotland… During a debate in the Holyrood chamber last week, only eight of the 129 MSPs voted to leave the EU”. In England’s Westminster there was no such debate – a significant failure of nerve.

With the Remain lead unassailable, the Scottish nation has made up its mind. It is England that has yet to decide. The present uncertainty is not a question of how ‘Britain’ will vote. Leave or Remain is an English question. [Continue reading…]

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Brexit’s leaders want to smash the system — but they won’t pay the price

Rafael Behr writes: There is no precedent for a country quitting the EU. The crisis would be continental. The Brexit camp has no idea what should happen. There is a plan to walk out and slam the door, but nowhere to go next. Turmoil is part of the appeal for leaders of the leave campaign, although they dare not advertise thrill-seeking among their motives. It makes them sound reckless.

They are reckless. For Boris Johnson, there is a career advantage in hastening the collapse of David Cameron’s premiership. Relations with Britain’s closest trading partners can be collateral damage in that campaign. There is nothing in Johnson’s record to suggest interest in the welfare of anyone who cannot advance his ambition.

Michael Gove’s case is more intriguing. The justice secretary is drawn to disorder as a purgative tonic – a moral enema for constipated bureaucracies. David Laws, the former Liberal Democrat schools minister, in his chronicle of coalition, recounts a private apology Cameron once made for Gove’s impulses: “The thing that you’ve got to remember with Michael is that he is basically a bit of a Maoist. He believes that the world makes progress through a process of creative destruction.” [Continue reading…]

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The meaningless politics of liberal democracies

Emma Green writes: Ben Affleck has become an unlikely spokesman for a view on Islam held by many on the American left. In 2014, the actor made a now-famous stand against Bill Maher and Sam Harris in defense of Muslims, arguing that it’s wrong to make generalizations about the religion based on ideological extremists and terrorists. “How about the more than 1 billion people who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punch women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches, and pray five times a day?” he said.

In his new book Islamic Exceptionalism, Shadi Hamid — an Atlantic contributor, a scholar at Brookings, and a self-identified liberal — calls Affleck’s declaration a “well-intentioned … red herring.” Islam really is different from other religions, he says, and many Muslims view politics, theocracy, and violence differently than do Christians, Jews, or non-religious people in Europe and the United States.

Perhaps his most provocative claim is this: History will not necessarily favor the secular, liberal democracies of the West. Hamid does not believe all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to rational Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should they. There are some basic arguments for this: Islam is growing, and in some majority-Muslim nations, huge numbers of citizens believe Islamic law should be upheld by the state. But Hamid also thinks there’s something lacking in Western democracies, that there’s a sense of overarching meaninglessness in political and cultural life in these countries that can help explain why a young Muslim who grew up in the U.K. might feel drawn to martyrdom, for example. This is not a dismissal of democracy, nor does it comprehensively explain the phenomenon of jihadism. Rather, it’s a note of skepticism about the promise of secular democracy — and the wisdom of pushing that model on other cultures and regions.

Most Islamists — people who, in his words, “believe Islam or Islamic law should play a central role in political life” — are not terrorists. But the meaning they find in religion, Hamid said, helps explain their vision of governance, and it’s one that can seem incomprehensible to people who live in liberal democracies.

I spoke with Hamid recently about Islamism, ISIS, and the “patronizing” assumptions Americans sometimes make about Islam. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Continue reading…]

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‘Gene drives’ that tinker with evolution are an unknown risk, researchers say

MIT Technology Review reports: With great power — in this case, a technology that can alter the rules of evolution — comes great responsibility. And since there are “considerable gaps in knowledge” about the possible consequences of releasing this technology, called a gene drive, into natural environments, it is not yet responsible to do so. That’s the major conclusion of a report published today by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Gene drives hold immense promise for controlling or eradicating vector-borne diseases like Zika virus and malaria, or in managing agricultural pests or invasive species. But the 200-page report, written by a committee of 16 experts, highlights how ill-equipped we are to assess the environmental and ecological risks of using gene drives. And it provides a glimpse at the challenges they will create for policymakers.

The technology is inspired by natural phenomena through which particular “selfish” genes are passed to offspring at higher rate than is normally allowed by nature in sexually reproducing organisms. There are multiple ways to make gene drives in the lab, but scientists are now using the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR to very rapidly and effectively do the trick. Evidence in mosquitoes, fruit flies, and yeast suggests that this could be used to spread a gene through nearly 100 percent of a population.

The possible ecological effects, intended or not, are far from clear, though. How long will gene drives persist in the environment? What is the chance that an engineered organism could pass the gene drive to an unintended recipient? How might these things affect the whole ecosystem? How much does all this vary depending on the particular organism and ecosystem?

Research on the molecular biology of gene drives has outpaced ecological research on how genes move through populations and between species, the report says, making it impossible to adequately answer these and other thorny questions. Substantially more laboratory research and confined field testing is needed to better grasp the risks. [Continue reading…]

Jim Thomas writes: If there is a prize for the fastest emerging tech controversy of the century the ‘gene drive’ may have just won it. In under eighteen months the sci-fi concept of a ‘mutagenic chain reaction’ that can drive a genetic trait through an entire species (and maybe eradicate that species too) has gone from theory to published proof of principle to massively-shared TED talk (apparently an important step these days) to the subject of a US National Academy of Sciences high profile study – complete with committees, hearings, public inputs and a glossy 216 page report release. Previous technology controversies have taken anywhere from a decade to over a century to reach that level of policy attention. So why were Gene Drives put on the turbo track to science academy report status? One word: leverage.

What a gene drive does is simple: it ensures that a chosen genetic trait will reliably be passed on to the next generation and every generation thereafter. This overcomes normal Mendelian genetics where a trait may be diluted or lost through the generations. The effect is that the engineered trait is driven through an entire population, re-engineering not just single organisms but enforcing the change in every descendant – re-shaping entire species and ecosystems at will.

It’s a perfect case of a very high-leverage technology. Archimedes famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. ” Gene drive developers are in effect saying “Give me a gene drive and an organism to put it in and I can wipe out species, alter ecosystems and cause large-scale modifications.” Gene drive pioneer Kevin Esvelt calls gene drives “an experiment where if you screw up, it affects the whole world”. [Continue reading…]

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CIA and Pentagon bicker while Russia wipes out U.S.-backed rebels

The Daily Beast reports: U.S.-backed opposition forces in Syria’s largest city are facing a ferocious Russian-led assault, raising fears that the rebels could be eliminated in a matter of weeks.
So how are the Pentagon and the intelligence community responding?

By catfighting among themselves.

Two Department of Defense officials told The Daily Beast that they are not eager to support the rebels in the city of Aleppo because they’re seen as being affiliated with al Qaeda in Syria, or Jabhat al Nusra. The CIA, which supports those rebel groups, rejects that claim, saying alliances of convenience in the face of a mounting Russian-led offensive have created marriages of battlefield necessity, not ideology.

“It is a strange thing that DoD hall chatter mimics Russian propaganda,” one U.S. official, who supports the intelligence community position, wryly noted to Pentagon claims that the opposition and Nusra are one in the same.

But even if the rebels were completely separated from Nusra, there would still be something of a strategic conflict with U.S. military goals. The rebels in Aleppo, these Pentagon officials note, are fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime; the American military effort, on the other hand, is primarily about defeating the self-proclaimed Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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Terrorism trial divides Somalis in Minneapolis

The New York Times reports: The day after his oldest son was convicted of conspiring to join and kill for the Islamic State in Syria, Abdihamid Yusuf just wanted to go home and rest. But bills were stacking up, so on Saturday morning he and his wife visited the jail and then reopened Hooyo’s Kitchen, the small Somali restaurant where they serve plates of chicken, rice and bananas.

“We try to survive,” Mr. Yusuf said.

The trial of his son and two other young Somali-American men splintered families and opinions here in the country’s largest Somali community. Former friends testified against one another, describing how they had watched propaganda videos, bought fake passports and plotted their paths to Syria. Family members squabbled in the halls of the courthouse. Some said they had been threatened or shunned.

When the jury came back on Friday afternoon, Mr. Yusuf did not even get word in time to reach the courtroom to see his 22-year-old son, Mohamed Farah, and the two other defendants, Guled Omar, 21, and Abdirahman Daud, 22, declared guilty. A total of nine men — including another of Mr. Yusuf’s sons, Adnan — have been convicted in the case.

Federal prosecutors say the case shined a light on the persistent problem of terrorist recruiting here. Law enforcement authorities have said that more than 20 young men from Minnesota have left to join the Shabab militant group in Somalia and that more than 15 have tried or succeeded in leaving to join the Islamic State.

But it also opened wounds among families, and at the end of the trial, some in the community praised justice served, while others pointed to what they called another injustice. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The F.B.I. has significantly increased its use of stings in terrorism cases, employing agents and informants to pose as jihadists, bomb makers, gun dealers or online “friends” in hundreds of investigations into Americans suspected of supporting the Islamic State, records and interviews show.

Undercover operations, once seen as a last resort, are now used in about two of every three prosecutions involving people suspected of supporting the Islamic State, a sharp rise in the span of just two years, according to a New York Times analysis. Charges have been brought against nearly 90 Americans believed to be linked to the group.

The increase in the number of these secret operations, which put operatives in the middle of purported plots, has come with little public or congressional scrutiny, and the stings rely on F.B.I. guidelines that predate the rise of the Islamic State.

While F.B.I. officials say they are careful to avoid illegally entrapping suspects, their undercover operatives are far from bystanders. In recent investigations from Florida to California, agents have helped people suspected of being extremists acquire weapons, scope out bombing targets and find the best routes to Syria to join the Islamic State, records show.

Officials said in interviews that because social media had given extremists a cloak of anonymity, these undercover stings — online and in person — had become increasingly vital to gathering evidence and deterring possible attacks in the United States.

“We’re not going to wait for the person to mobilize on his own time line,” said Michael B. Steinbach, who leads the F.B.I.’s national security branch. He added that the F.B.I. could not afford to “just sit and wait knowing the individual is actively plotting.”

Counterterrorism officials said the Islamic State had inspired loyalists to strike quickly, even within days or weeks of their radicalization. Unlike wiretaps or searches, undercover operations do not require a judge to sign a warrant. They are overseen by F.B.I. supervisors and Justice Department prosecutors, and so can usually be started more quickly.

But defense lawyers, Muslim leaders and civil liberties advocates say that F.B.I. operatives coax suspects into saying and doing things that they might not otherwise do — the essence of entrapment. [Continue reading…]

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Bernie Sanders’ choice: What to do when winter is coming?

David Corn writes: In the HBO series Game of Thrones, one overwhelming theme has dominated the six seasons: humans should not get lost in bickering for power when an existential threat looms. All the various clans — the Lannisters, the Starks, the Targaryens, the Boltons, the Tyrells, the Baratheons, and others — waste blood and treasure vying for control of this throne or that castle, while a zombie army with the capacity to eradicate humanity is slowly advancing from the north. Oh fools, you mortals be. And as the political primary season draws to an end, Democrats are in a position similar to that of the assorted houses of Westeros. An existential threat is on the horizon: Donald Trump. He’s a narcissistic bigot who in power could be a profound danger. He seems to lack a basic understanding of the nuclear arsenal of which he would be in charge. He claims climate change is a hoax. He has vowed to play chicken with the debt ceiling. It is not hard to envision him triggering (or ignoring) crises that would threaten the survival of the United States or other parts of the globe. If he accepted budgets from the Republican-controlled Congress, millions of low- and middle-income Americans would lose assistance. And his Supreme Court appointments could well restrict reproductive rights, bolster corporate interests, and approve further erosions of voting rights. Make America great again? No, with Trump, winter is coming.

Given this harsh reality, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the socialist independent turned Democrat who has run a stupendous campaign that has promoted progressive causes and inspired millions, has a stark choice. To continue his crusade to win the Democratic Party’s crown or to drop his claim and join forces with a rival to form a common front against the Night’s King (that is, Trump). And he ought to reach a decision soon. [Continue reading…]

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Why the world is drawing battle lines against American tech imperialism

Farhad Manjoo writes: Imagine you are a French lawmaker. For decades, you have protected your nation’s cultural output with the diligence of a gardener tending a fragile patch against invasive killer weeds.

You have imposed quotas on the French film industry, required radio stations to play more French music than anyone seems to want to listen to, and you have worked methodically to exempt your actions from international free-trade rules.

And now, out of nowhere, come a handful of American technology companies to wash away all your cultural defenses. Suddenly just about everything that a French citizen buys, reads, watches or listens to flows in some way or another through these behemoths.

There is Facebook co-opting your news media. Amazon is dominating book sales, while YouTube and Netflix are taking over television and movies. And the smartphone, arguably the most important platform for entertainment in this era, is controlled almost entirely by Apple and Google.

This backdrop of social anxiety explains why Europe is on the march against American tech giants. European governments have been at the forefront of an effort to limit the reach of tech companies, most often through privacy regulations and antitrust investigations. Now the European Commission is considering rules that would require streaming companies like Netflix to carry and even pay for local content in the markets they serve.

The European efforts are just a taste of a coming global freak-out over the power of the American tech industry. Over the next few years, we are bound to see increasing friction between the tiny group of tech companies that rule much of the industry and the governments that rule the lands those companies are trying to invade. [Continue reading…]

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Global violence worsens, driven by Middle East conflicts

Reuters reports: The world has become increasingly violent with deaths from conflict at a 25-year high, terrorist attacks at an all-time high and more people displaced than at any time since World War Two, the 2016 Global Peace Index showed on Wednesday.

The annual index, which measures 23 indicators including incidents of violent crime, countries’ levels of militarisation and weapons imports, said intensifying conflicts in the Middle East were mostly to blame.

But beyond the Middle East, the world was actually becoming more peaceful, researchers behind the index said.

“Quite often, in the mayhem which is happening in the Middle East currently, we lose sight of the other positive trends,” said Steve Killelea, founder of the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), which produces the index.

“If we look in the last year, if we took out the Middle East … the world would have become more peaceful,” Killelea told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. [Continue reading…]

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