Dennis Kucinich says he wants peace in Syria. The war crimes are just details

BuzzFeed reports: Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich doesn’t want to say whether or not Syria is a democracy. He’d prefer not to comment on just what Russia’s role in the bombing of Eastern Aleppo was. And he’d really just rather the world focus on peace in Syria, rather than what to do with President Bashar al-Assad.

That was the best that could be drawn from Kucinich in a half-hour phone interview with BuzzFeed News, given days after his return from what he repeatedly referred to as a “fact-finding mission” to Syria alongside Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. While there, both he and Gabbard met with Assad, who has refused to yield power as a precondition for the halt of the civil war that has ground on for more than five years.

Gabbard first revealed officially that she had not only been in Syria but sat down with Assad in an interview with CNN on Wednesday. She denied initial reports that said hers was a secret mission, saying that both the House Ethics Committee and leadership were notified.

(Gabbard’s office has declined to give further comments on her trip beyond her CNN interview and the press release it sent around shortly after.)

Kucinich backed that up, saying that the State Department was also informed as soon as they learned that it would be possible for them to cross from Lebanon into Syria. The trip was funded and arranged by ACCESS-Ohio, a local Arab-American support group that Kucinich has known and worked with as Cleveland’s congressman since shortly after their founding in 1993 until he left Congress in 2012. “If they had a political agenda, I wouldn’t go,” he said. “I’ve had a lifetime in politics, I don’t need more politics.” [Continue reading…]

The Daily Beast reports: Almost no information exists in the public domain about AACCESS—Ohio. Ohio Secretary of State records indicate it was founded in 1991, and has been in and out of existence ever since. It has sponsored just one other Congressional trip, one that brought Kucinich to Syria in 2006 and in 2011.

Its website is out of action. It has no identifiable social media presence.

However, a 2006 article refers to “Sam Khawam,” an alias of Bassam Khawam’s, as the “chairman of the Arab American Community Center for Social and Economic Services.” It would suggest, then, despite the slight naming discrepancy (“Social and Economic” rather than “Economic and Social”), that the Messrs. Khawam are part of AACCESS. On Thursday, The Guardian reported that Bassam Khawam was the executive director of the organization.

Contacted Thursday by The Daily Beast and asked about the delegation, Bassam Khawam said he was on another call and, requesting a contact number, pledged to phone back. He had not done so at the time of writing.

Who, then, are the Khawams? Gabbard’s press release described the pair as “longtime peace advocates.” The reality is, to put it as politely as possible, more complicated.

In truth, Bassam and Elie Khawam are both officials in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a political party and paramilitary organization founded in Lebanon in 1932, and currently actively engaged in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Assad regime. [Continue reading…]

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UN officials: Yemen could face famine if no immediate action

The Associated Press reports: U.N. officials warned Thursday that the escalating conflict in Yemen has left two-thirds of the population in need of humanitarian aid and the country could face famine this year unless immediate action is taken.

U.N. Special Envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed told the Security Council that the “dangerous” upsurge in airstrikes and fighting is having “tragic consequences for the Yemeni people,” with 18.2 million in need of emergency food.

U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien warned that “an astounding 10.3 million Yemenis … require immediate assistance to save or sustain their lives” — and “at least two million people need emergency food assistance to survive.”

“The conflict in Yemen is now the primary driver of the largest food security emergency in the world,” O’Brien said. “If there is no immediate action, famine is now a possible scenario for 2017.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump says sanctuary cities are hotbeds of crime. Data say the opposite

Christopher Ingraham writes: The “sanctuary cities” that President Trump has repeatedly characterized as incubators of crime are generally safer than other cities, according to a new analysis of FBI crime data.

There’s no legal definition of a sanctuary city, but most observers adopt criteria used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify cities and counties where local authorities refuse to hand over illegal immigrants to federal agents for deportation.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump often characterized these locales as dangerous hotbeds of criminal activity and promised to suspend all federal funding to them.

“We will end the sanctuary cities that have resulted in so many needless deaths,” he told a crowd in Phoenix in the fall.

But an analysis of FBI crime data by Tom Wong, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, finds that counties designated as “sanctuary” areas by ICE typically experience significantly lower rates of all types of crime, including lower homicide rates, than comparable non-sanctuary counties. The analysis was published by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: President Donald Trump’s plan to enlist local police and sheriff’s departments in immigration enforcement has set the stage for a pitched battle with California officials who have long prioritized building ties with immigrant communities.

Trump’s plan, which was issued Wednesday as part of a pair of executive orders, seeks to broaden the reach of federal immigration authorities into county jails.

It also calls for empowering police officers and deputies to act as immigration enforcers, leaving open the possibility that they would be required to inquire about the immigration status of the people they encounter on the streets.

Such a regime could conflict with the Los Angeles Police Department’s decades-old policy that prohibits officers from initiating contact with a person solely to ask about whether he or she is in the country legally.

Local governments that defy the Trump administration’s immigration policies by acting as “sanctuary cities” could be denied federal funding, one of the executive orders states.

More than 400 jurisdictions across the country, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and about 40 others in California, have such policies protecting immigrants.

California state officials have signaled that they will put up a fight. The California Legislature has selected former U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to serve as outside counsel on the state’s legal strategy for dealing with the incoming administration.

The state’s new attorney general, former congressman Xavier Becerra, said at his swearing-in Tuesday that he will form a united front with officials from other states to defend their policies against any federal challenges.

Hours after Trump signed the executive orders, Los Angeles leaders suggested they would mount a legal challenge if funding is taken away. [Continue reading…]

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Reports: Arrested Russian intel officer allegedly spied for U.S.

USA Today reports: A senior Russian intelligence officer and cybersecurity investigator arrested last month on treason charges allegedly was passing information to U.S. intelligence services, according to Russian media outlets.

Sergei Mikhailov, who worked for the FSB, the successor to the KGB, was arrested in December, along with Ruslan Stoyanov, a top manager for Russia’s largest cybersecurity firm, according to the economic newspaper Kommersant. Stoyanov was also charged with suspicion of treason.

In addition, two other people, including Major Dmitry Dokuchaev, also an FSB officer, were arrested in connection with the case, according to Russia’s REN-TV. The fourth person was not identified.

Stoyanov allegedly developed a program introduced into a prominent bank’s computer system to gather privileged information on customers, REN-TV reports. That information, it reports, was then sold to the West.

In another twist, Russian media says the FSB believes Mikhailov tipped U.S. intelligence about Vladimir Fomenko and his server rental company “King Servers.” The U.S. cybersecurity company Threat Connect identified King Servers last year as an “information nexus” used by hackers suspected of working for Russian intelligence in cyberattacks on electoral systems in Arizona and Illinois.

The Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta says Mikhailov was arrested during an FSB meeting in early December when officers came into the room, put a bag over his head and took him away.

The cause of the arrests was not clear. The newspaper said only that the FSB discovered Mikhailov’s alleged involvement in the purported plot after the U.S. accused King Servers of the cyberattacks on the U.S. [Continue reading…]

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A viral Washington Post story about State Department resignations is very misleading

Vox reports: On Thursday morning, the Washington Post published a piece with an explosive headline: “The State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” The piece alleged that Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, one of the top officials the department, and three of his deputies had left their jobs because they didn’t want to serve in the Trump administration.

“The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era,” Josh Rogin, the story’s author, wrote.

There was certainly an element of truth to the report: Kennedy and those three deputies had indeed left the department. And the story went viral almost immediately. According to Ishaan Tharoor, a foreign affairs writer for the Post, the story was “breaking” Chartbeat, a tool used by news websites to take stock of traffic. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said on Twitter.

But as the day went on, key elements of the article came into question. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu thinks a ‘state-minus’ is enough for the Palestinians

The Washington Post reports: A few hours before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by telephone with President Trump on Sunday, the Israeli leader huddled behind closed doors with his security cabinet.

Ministers on his hard-right pressed Netanyahu to publicly proclaim the “two-state solution” dead.

The Israeli leader refused but told his raucous cabinet not to worry. Netanyahu said he did not support a full Palestinian state, but “a state-minus,” according to Israeli reports on the meeting.

In the days since, Israelis, Palestinians and American diplomats have been struggling to define what Netanyahu might have meant by “a state-minus.”

State-minus is clearly shorthand for how Netanyahu sees his bottom-line position to the decades-long conflict here, including the thorniest of thorny issues — who controls Jerusalem, with its shrines holy to three world religions.

But shorthand for what? [Continue reading…]

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Mexico, unlike Britain, refuses to bow to America’s naked emperor

The New York Times reports: For decades, the United States and Mexico have expanded their cooperation and increasingly entwined their fortunes. Now the relationship between America and one of its most important allies and trading partners is being rewritten — on Twitter — culminating in a remarkable back-and-forth as the world looked on.

It began with Mr. Trump’s proclamation to build the wall. Next came a diplomatic response from Mr. Peña Nieto, urging unity, accompanied by suggestions from his aides that the meeting might be scrapped over the offense.

Mr. Trump followed on Thursday morning with a threat to cancel the meeting himself. Soon after, Mr. Peña Nieto officially announced that he would not attend, effectively beating Mr. Trump to the punch.

The exchange offered insight into the evolution of Mexico’s president, who began his term with great fanfare in 2012, only to be hounded by scandal, the violence engulfing his nation, a steady decline in the polls and, now, perhaps the worst period in Mexican-American relations since President Calvin Coolidge. [Continue reading…]

Jorge Guajardo writes: Trump now faces a southern neighbor largely united in its anti-U.S. sentiment. This sentiment is not primarily moved by his intention to renegotiate NAFTA; or his racist, anti-Mexican rhetoric; or even by the idea of the wall itself, which anyone who has actually been to the U.S.-Mexico border knows is patently absurd given the topography along the 2,000-odd mile length of the border — not to mention the large swathes of protected or privately owned land there. The sentiment, which led every single political leader in Mexico to demand that President Peña Nieto cancel his trip to Washington, comes from the indignity of the notion that Mexico will somehow pay for the wall. The Trump administration is basing its entire approach to the bilateral relationship with Mexico on a ludicrous and arrogant proposition: that it can make another sovereign nation foot the bill for its own xenophobic construction project.

Trump has recklessly and needlessly ushered in a dark era in U.S.-Mexico relations. Gratuitously bashing Mexico and Mexican immigrants plays well with Trump’s base, and in his ignorance, he seems to believe he can do it without consequences. With the possible exception of Canada, there is no other country with as many areas and levels of cooperation with the U.S. as Mexico. Issues of trade, transportation, national security, organized crime, water, the environment, health, and immigration that affect both countries rely on extensive bilateral cooperation and goodwill.

As Mexico prepares for a presidential election in 2018, every candidate worth his or her salt will try to outdo the competitors in anti-U.S. posturing. They will promise to expel armed U.S. law-enforcement personnel from Mexico, to legalize drugs, to allow Central American migrants to reach the U.S. border, to stop sharing water with drought-ravaged border states. Some of them, if elected, may even want to emulate Trump and follow through on their most ridiculous campaign promises. The voters, for sure, will be egging them on to stick it to the United States.

From an early age, every Mexican is taught that Mexico lost half its territory to its imperialist northern neighbor. Ask any Mexican child and they will name all six “Niños Heroes,” young cadets who died defending Chapultepec castle from the invading U.S. forces in 1847. One of them is said to have wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and jumped to his death rather than be captured by the Americans. His story might be as apocryphal as George Washington’s cherry tree, but it nonetheless remains a powerful symbol of Mexican nationalism: We will just as soon suffer hardship, or even death, than be submitted to humiliation from the U.S. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, as the Washington Post reports, British Prime Minister Theresa May appears to have few reservations about ingratiating herself through obsequious overtures she is now making to Trump: May’s loyalty is being rewarded this week with a plum designation: On Friday, she will be the first foreign leader to meet Trump in the Oval Office. The meeting will give her a prime chance to pitch Trump on a U.S.-Britain free-trade deal, an agreement that May has signaled will be a top priority of her premiership as Britain prepares to leave the European Union.

But as she was winging across the Atlantic on Thursday, she also faced a wicked backlash in London from lawmakers who say her courting of the new U.S. president has gone too far.

The criticism came after Downing Street released excerpts from a speech May intends to deliver Thursday at a retreat for Republican congressmen in Philadelphia. Trump is also due to address the gathering.

In her speech, May seems to endorse Trump’s view of himself as a turnaround artist who can restore America to lost greatness. Both the United States and Britain, she is due to tell the Republicans, are “rediscover[ing] our confidence.”

“As you renew your nation just as we renew ours — we have the opportunity — indeed the responsibility — to renew the Special Relationship for this new age,” May will say, according to the excerpts. “We have the opportunity to lead, together, again.”

May’s office also said she would be bearing gifts when she meets the Trumps: “a hamper full of produce” from the prime minister’s country retreat, Chequers, for first lady Melania Trump; and for the president, “an engraved Quaich” — a two-handled cup that is an ancient Scottish symbol of friendship.

But back in London, May’s friendship mission was falling flat, as lawmakers wondered how their leader could seemingly ignore Trump’s more extreme positions and actions, include his advocacy of torture, his promotion of protectionism and his proposed ban on Syrian refugees. [Continue reading…]

The White House accuses the press of being part of a campaign to delegitimize Trump. In truth, Trump delegitimizes himself on a daily basis.

The only question anyone — foreign leader, cabinet secretary, federal official, or journalist — should be asking themselves is whether through their words an actions they are lending legitimacy to a man who would otherwise have none.

The United States now has at its helm an imbecile, a naked emperor, a national embarrassment.

This charade is only being sustained by those who are willing to afford Trump respect which he has done nothing to earn.

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The U.S. is no longer a ‘full democracy,’ a new study warns

Amanda Erickson writes: The government of the United States got a downgrade this week: We’re no longer a “full democracy,” according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest Democracy Index. For the first time, we were bumped down to “flawed,” thanks to an “erosion of public trust in political institutions.”

According to the report’s authors, a flawed democracy has free elections but “weak governance, an underdeveloped political culture and low levels of political participation.” Other countries that share this dubious honor include Italy, Japan, France and India. Rankings are based on a country’s electoral process, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation and political culture.

That downgrade puts us at 21 in the rankings. Norway, Iceland and Sweden were ranked as the world’s most vibrant democracies, followed by New Zealand and Denmark; Canada and Ireland tied for sixth place. Syria and North Korea came, somewhat predictably, in last. [Continue reading…]

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The State Department’s entire senior administrative team just resigned

Josh Rogin writes: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.

Tillerson was actually inside the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land. I reported Wednesday morning that the Trump team was narrowing its search for his No. 2, and that it was looking to replace the State Department’s long-serving undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy, who has been in that job for nine years, was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep that job under Tillerson, three State Department officials told me.

Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career Foreign Service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s order to ban refugees and immigrants triggers fears across the globe

The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s executive order to tighten the vetting of potential immigrants and visitors to the United States, as well as to ban some refugees seeking to resettle in the country, will shatter countless dreams and divide families, would-be immigrants and ­human rights activists warned.

The draft order calls for an immediate halt to resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States, rejecting visas for visitors and immigrant hopefuls based partly on their ideology and opinions. A copy of the draft order was leaked Wednesday to civil rights groups and obtained by The Washington Post.

“I feel devastated,” said Ibrahim Abu Ghanem, 37, a father of three in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, whose father and two brothers live in the United States. “This means all my plans are going to go down the drain.”

If the order is enacted, among those immediately affected would be potential immigrants and visitors from seven Muslim countries — Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Iran, Libya and Sudan — that are considered by the Trump administration to be nations whose citizens “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” For the next 30 days, they will not be allowed entry into the United States, even if they have visas and relatives who are U.S. citizens. [Continue reading…]

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Aleppo’s bitter lessons

Sam Heller writes: Syrian rebels’ loss of east Aleppo in December was a turning point in the country’s civil war. But rebel Aleppo didn’t just fall — it fell hard.

Rebels had braced themselves, even under siege and surrounded on all sides, to hold out for as long as a year. Instead, faced with an overwhelming assault by the forces of the regime of Bashar al-Assad and its Russian and Iranian allies, they collapsed in weeks. Cornered in a last handful of neighborhoods, they barely managed to negotiate their safe exit from the city.

Aleppo had been a stronghold of Syria’s “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) rebels and of revolutionary civil society — one of the last vital pieces of opposition territory where patriotic nationalists dominated, not jihadists. Its loss effectively ends the Syrian opposition’s ability to challenge the regime for control of Syria’s most populous urban centers and the country as a whole. Now, after Aleppo’s fall, rebels and their backers have been left to piece together just what happened. What they take away from the loss of Aleppo will likely determine how they move forward — whether they will hold fast to the revolutionary flag or run up the black flag of jihadism, and what kind of war they can win, if any.

“We all knew there was an attack coming, during this period when a new U.S. president was coming in, this political vacuum,” said Omar Salkhou, Aleppo commander of rebel faction Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zinki. “We expected it. But we didn’t expect that we’d lose the city.”

According to a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, rebels’ rapid collapse caught their foreign backers flat footed.

“The only way [Western intelligence liaisons] could know what was happening was through communicating with people inside, and all they could work on was the story being told to them by these [armed] groups,” the diplomat told me. “They said they’d be fine for six months, that the regime would pay for every street.”

Aleppo’s rebel-held eastern neighborhoods had been a symbol of the Syrian revolution: of self-governance under an opposition city council; of spontaneous civil society and activism; and of the patriotic, FSA armed opposition, rebels who still flew the revolutionary tricolor instead of Islamists and jihadists’ more austere black banners.

But according to opposition-friendly Western diplomats, Aleppo rebel commanders, and local civilians and activists who spoke to me for this report, eastern Aleppo also seems to have been undone by many of the same contradictions and weaknesses that have plagued the FSA across the country and over the course of Syria’s protest movement turned armed struggle.

Aleppo’s rebels were outgunned. They were facing down a regime whose allies, Russia and Iran, were willing to do whatever it took to ensure its victory. Rebels’ backers were never ready to match that commitment. The regime and its allies trapped rebels inside a free-fire zone with tens of thousands of panicking civilians, including the rebels’ neighbors, families, and friends. And — unbeknownst to rebel backers, and maybe rebels themselves — Aleppo’s rebels were too broken, exhausted, and generally dysfunctional to properly hold the line.

After four years of war and against a Syrian regime buttressed by thousands of Iranian-organized militia auxiliaries and the full force of Russian artillery, air power, and likely special forces, Aleppo’s rebels were set to lose.

“Russia was going to win this,” another Western diplomat told me. “Iran, in particular, was going to win this. There was almost no limit to how much they were prepared to escalate to make that happen.”

The problems of Aleppo’s rebels are the problems of Syria’s rebels writ large, especially the internationally approved and backed “FSA” armed opposition. They’ve picked a head-on fight they can’t win — not in Aleppo, or anywhere else. [Continue reading…]

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Mexican president cancels meeting with Trump

CNN reports: Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Thursday canceled a meeting with US President Donald Trump that had been set for next week after renewed tensions erupted over Trump’s plan to build a wall on the border.

“This morning we have informed the White House that I will not attend the meeting scheduled for next Tuesday with the POTUS,” Peña Nieto tweeted.
Earlier Thursday morning, Trump had tweeted that it would be better to skip the meeting if Peña Nieto continued to insist Mexico would not pay for the wall — something the Mexican leader had said as recently as Wednesday evening.
“If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting,” Trump tweeted and in an earlier tweet he noted the US’s trade deficit with Mexico and what he said were the American job losses caused by NAFTA.


Trump spoke about the cancellation during remarks at a gathering of congressional Republicans in Philadelphia.

Trump said that he and the Mexican president had mutually agreed to scrap their planned get together, and he repeated his position that the US won’t fund the wall.

“Unless Mexico will treat the US fairly, with respect, such a meeting is fruitless, and I want to go a different route,” Trump told House and Senate GOP lawmakers. “I have no choice.”

“Border security is a serious, serious issue and a national problem,” Trump said. “Most illegal immigration is coming from our Southern border.”

On Wednesday night, Peña Nieto had said at that time he did not see a need to scrap the get together — but he strongly reiterated that his country wouldn’t fund any border wall, which Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday would cost $12-$15 billion.

“President Trump’s insistence that Mexico will pay for the wall has once again just been proven as delusional fiction by the Mexican President,” said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. “The wall is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle in the making, and Republicans should be embarrassed about their brazen hypocrisy in enabling it.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s headline-grabbing executive orders may lead nowhere

Politico reports: President Donald Trump’s team made little effort to consult with federal agency lawyers or lawmakers as they churned out executive actions this week, stoking fears the White House is creating the appearance of real momentum with flawed orders that might be unworkable, unenforceable or even illegal.

The White House didn’t ask State Department experts to review Trump’s memorandum on the Keystone XL pipeline, even though the company that wants to build the pipeline is suing the U.S. for $15 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo were “blindsided” by a draft order that would require agencies to reconsider using interrogation techniques that are currently banned as torture, according to sources with knowledge of their thinking.

Just a small circle of officials at the Department of Health and Human Services knew about the executive action starting to unwind Obamacare, and only less than two hours before it was released. Key members of Congress weren’t consulted either, according to several members. And at a conference in Philadelphia, GOP legislators say they had no idea whether some of the executive orders would contrast with existing laws — because they hadn’t reviewed them. [Continue reading…]

Contrast or conflict? I guess Politico doesn’t have enough editors.

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Trump’s vetting plan would weaken U.S. security

Donald Kerwin and Edward Alden write: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem,” H.L. Mencken wrote. “Neat, plausible, and wrong.” Such is the case with President Trump’s plans to temporarily halt the flow of refugees to the United States and bar travelers from certain Muslim countries. What could be neater and more plausible than cracking down on people from terrorism hot spots to ensure that no terrorists are admitted to the country?

Yet as Trump and the country may painfully relearn, effective screening to protect homeland security requires good intelligence and close cooperation with allies to identify genuine threats. The crude alternatives the president advocates will weaken that cooperation, damage U.S. diplomacy and leave the United States more exposed to terrorism.

The United States has made this mistake before. After Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration launched a series of initiatives to block the entry of people from Muslim-majority countries as a security measure to prevent follow-on attacks. The most sweeping was the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, in which nearly all male immigrants and travelers from two dozen Muslim-majority nations and North Korea faced what could be called “extreme vetting”; each time they tried to enter the United States, they were pulled aside for hours of secondary screening and forced to undergo intrusive questioning by border officials. Those already living here had to register with the government, face similar questioning and prove their lawful status. [Continue reading…]

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Doomsday Clock closer to midnight in wake of Trump presidency

The Guardian reports: The election of Donald Trump and wider geopolitical turbulence are so dangerous that the scientists behind the Doomsday Clock have pushed it forward to 2 minutes and 30 seconds before midnight.

The new “time” means experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists believe the earth is closer to imminent peril than at any point in the last 64 years.

The clock, an indicator of the world’s vulnerability to nuclear, environmental and political threats, was set at 3 minutes to midnight – with midnight being the apocalypse – in 2016.

“The current political situation in the US is a particular concern,” said theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss at a press conference in Washington DC on Thursday.

“The Trump administration needs to state clearly and unequivocally that it accepts that climate change is caused by human activity,” added Krauss, explaining that although some global progress such as the Paris accord was made last year, 2016 was the hottest year on record.

Several of Trump’s cabinet nominees are climate sceptics, such as Mick Mulvaney as head of the Office of Management and Budget, which Krauss notes “foreshadows the possibility they will be openly hostile to even modest efforts to combat climate change.”

But climate change isn’t the only issue. Nuclear weapons, particularly those held by the United States and Russia and the testing of weapons by North Korea, and tensions in Syria, Ukraine and Kashmir all making the world a more dangerous place than it was last year. [Continue reading…]

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Top Russian cybercrimes agent arrested on charges of treason

The New York Times reports: A senior official in the Russian cyberintelligence department that American officials say oversaw last year’s election hacking has been arrested in Moscow on charges of treason, a Russian newspaper reported Wednesday.

The arrest of Sergei Mikhailov, a senior officer of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the main successor agency to the K.G.B., is a rare instance of turmoil in the country’s usually shadowy cybersecurity apparatus slipping into public view.

Mr. Mikhailov served in the F.S.B.’s Center for Information Security, the agency’s cyberintelligence branch, which has been implicated in the American election hacking. But it is not clear whether the arrest was related to those intrusions.

He was detained along with one of Russia’s leading private-sector cybersecurity experts, Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of computer incident response investigations at the Kaspersky Lab, which makes antivirus programs.

The company confirmed in a statement that Mr. Stoyanov had been arrested, but said his arrest “has nothing to do with Kaspersky Lab and its operations.”

Still, the arrests of the men, who had cooperated in Russia to prosecute cybercriminals, shed light on the intersection of cybercrime, private antivirus companies and the Russian security services. [Continue reading…]

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Time to leave Afghanistan, Taliban tell Trump

Al Jazeera reports: The Taliban has called on President Donald Trump to withdraw US forces from the “quagmire” of Afghanistan, saying nothing has been achieved in 15 years of war except bloodshed and destruction.

In an open letter to the new US president published on one of its official web pages, the Taliban said the US had lost credibility after spending a trillion dollars on a fruitless entanglement.

“So, the responsibility to bring to an end this war also rests on your [Trump’s] shoulders,” it said.

Afghanistan was invaded by the US in 2001 and has become Washington’s longest military intervention since Vietnam.

The Taliban justify their ongoing insurgency in the letter, claiming that the group’s “Jihad and struggle was legitimate religiously, intellectually, nationally and conforming to all other lawful standards”.

So far, Trump has had little to say publicly about Afghanistan, where around 8,400 US troops remain as part of the NATO-led coalition’s training mission to support local forces as well as a separate US counterterrorism mission. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Over the past eight years, Afghans have become increasingly disillusioned with the American role in their country. Many blamed President Barack Obama’s policies for an increase in Afghan corruption, for air attacks that killed civilians, and for a foreign troop presence that failed to stop Taliban insurgents and was pulled out too quickly.

So it is not surprising that, like American voters who supported Donald Trump out of a longing for change, many Afghans are looking to his presidency as a chance for a fresh start. Most know little about Trump except that he may do something bold and unexpected. For now, that sounds appealing.

“Obama was too predictable. Sometimes a small dose of madness can be good,” said Davood Moradian, director of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies. He suggested that Trump’s bluntness and “masculine” approach may be useful for deterring the insurgencies that are thwarting Afghanistan’s path to stability and development. [Continue reading…]

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