Britain: Syrian airdrops begin next month if more aid blocked

USA Today reports: The United Kingdom said Tuesday the World Food Program will begin airdrops to besieged areas of Syria on June 1, if humanitarian access is not provided.

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime continues to remove medical aid from humanitarian convoys and to prevent convoys from reaching Syrians in need, said British Ambassador to the United States Kim Darroch. If the practice continues, the World Food Program will create an airdrop program starting June 1, Darroch said.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond made the announcement after meeting with the International Syria Support Group in Vienna to discuss ways to save a shaky partial cease-fire.

The airdrops will be conducted by United Nations airplanes with security guaranteed by Russia.

Syrian government forces last week removed medical supplies from an aid convoy to the town of Moadamiya, according to the World Health Organization. Similar incidents have been reported since. [Continue reading…]

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What’s left of the Syrian Arab Army? Not much

Tom Cooper writes: The general impression is that the Syrian Arab Army remains the largest military force involved in the Syrian Civil War, and that  —  together with the so-called National Defense Forces — — it remains the dominant military service under the control of government of Pres. Bashar Al Assad.

Media that are at least sympathetic to the Al-Assad regime remain insistent in presenting the image of the “SAA fighting on all front lines”  — only sometimes supported by the NDF and, less often, by “allies.”

The devil is in the details, as some say. Indeed, a closer examination of facts on the ground reveals an entirely different picture. The SAA and NDF are nearly extinct.

Because of draft-avoidance and defections — — and because Al Assad’s regime was skeptical of the loyalty of the majority of its military units  —  the SAA never managed to fully mobilize.

Not one of around 20 divisions it used to have has ever managed to deploy more than one-third of its nominal strength on the battlefield. The resulting 20 brigade-size task forces  — each between 2,000- and 4,000-strong  —  were then further hit by several waves of mass defections, but also extensive losses caused by the incompetence of their commanders.

Unsurprisingly, the regime was already critically short of troops by summer of 2012, when advisers from the Qods Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps concluded that units organized along religious and political lines had proven more effective in combat than the rest of the Syrian military had.

Thus the regime’s creation, in cooperation with Iran, of the National Defense Forces. Officially, the NDF is a pro-government militia acting as a part-time volunteer reserve component of the military. Envisioned by its Iranian creators as an equivalent to the IRGC’s Basiji Corps, the NDF became an instrument of formalizing the status of hundreds of “popular committees” created by the Syrian Ba’ath Party in the 1980s.

According to Iranian claims, the NDF’s stand-up resulted in the addition of a 100,000-strong auxiliary to Syria’s force-structure. Moreover, the NDF functioned as a catalyst for the reorganization of the entire Syrian military into a hodgepodge of sectarian militias. [Continue reading…]

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Tunisia’s Ennahda party leader: ‘We are Muslim democrats, not Islamists’

Middle East Eye reports: Tunisia’s Ennahda party will separate its religious activities from political ones, its chief said in statements published on Thursday ahead of a weekend congress to formalise the change.

Rached Ghannouchi told French daily Le Monde there was no room left in post-Arab Spring Tunisia for “political Islam”.

“Tunisia is now a democracy. The 2014 constitution has imposed limits on extreme secularism and extreme religion,” he was quoted as saying.

“We want religious activity to be completely independent from political activity.

“This is good for politicians because they would no longer be accused of manipulating religion for political means and good for religion because it would not be held hostage to politics,” said Ghannouchi. [Continue reading…]

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Portugal runs for four days straight on renewable energy alone

The Guardian reports: Portugal kept its lights on with renewable energy alone for four consecutive days last week in a clean energy milestone revealed by data analysis of national energy network figures.

Electricity consumption in the country was fully covered by solar, wind and hydro power in an extraordinary 107-hour run that lasted from 6.45am on Saturday 7 May until 5.45pm the following Wednesday, the analysis says.

News of the zero emissions landmark comes just days after Germany announced that clean energy had powered almost all its electricity needs on Sunday 15 May, with power prices turning negative at several times in the day – effectively paying consumers to use it.

Oliver Joy, a spokesman for the Wind Europe trade association said: “We are seeing trends like this spread across Europe – last year with Denmark and now in Portugal. The Iberian peninsula is a great resource for renewables and wind energy, not just for the region but for the whole of Europe.”

James Watson, the CEO of SolarPower Europe said: “This is a significant achievement for a European country, but what seems extraordinary today will be commonplace in Europe in just a few years. The energy transition process is gathering momentum and records such as this will continue to be set and broken across Europe.” [Continue reading…]

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Israel plans to expand ‘Iron Dome’ to warships to protect offshore facilities

The Wall Street Journal reports: Israel on Wednesday said it plans to expand a key missile-defense system to warships, in a bid to protect the country’s lucrative offshore gas fields amid growing aerial threats from regional adversaries.

Israel’s military said it had successfully tested a naval version of its land-based Iron Dome system in recent weeks and would begin deploying it on its newest frigates to protect the country’s strategic assets, including its gas rigs.

The naval system is a combination of the land-based Iron Dome missile interceptor and radar systems on ships, the military said. “We call it the Iron Dome of the sea,” Col. Ariel Shir, head of operational systems in the Israeli navy, told reporters on a phone call.

Israel’s land-based Iron Dome missile defense system intercepts short-range rockets and has become a bedrock of the country’s defense since its introduction in 2011.

The ship-based Iron Dome system would augment a combination of land-based systems that Israel has jointly developed with the U.S., and that it hopes will provide a layered defense against a variety of short range missile threats to those capable of flying more than 600 miles. [Continue reading…]

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Most mass shooters aren’t mentally ill. So why push better treatment as the answer?

The Washington Post reports: When it comes to mass shootings, President Obama and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan are in rare accord on a leading culprit.

Both point fingers at mental illness. And in poll after poll, most Americans agree.

But criminologists and forensic psychiatrists say there is a critical flaw in that view: It doesn’t reflect reality.

While acknowledging that some of the country’s worst mass shooters were psychotic — the Colorado theater gunman, James Holmes, with his orange-dyed hair; the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung Hui Cho, whom a judge ordered to get treatment — experts say the vast majority of such killers did not have any classic form of serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or psychosis.

Instead, they were more often ruthless sociopaths whose ­behavior, while unfathomable, can’t typically be treated as mental illness.

The oversimplification, experts say, is perpetuated by the gun industry and a society that assumes that the mentally ill are the only ones capable of deadly rampages. Now, with the White House and Congress prioritizing an overhaul of the ­mental-health system to try to curtail mass shootings and gun violence, critics say the country is chasing an expensive and potentially counterproductive cure on the basis of the wrong diagnosis.

“It would be ridiculous to hope that doing something about the mental-health system will stop these mass murders,” said Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and author of “The Anatomy of Evil,” which examines the personalities of brutal killers. “It’s really folly.” [Continue reading…]

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How PTSD became a problem far beyond the battlefield

Sebastian Junger writes: The first time I experienced what I now understand to be post-traumatic stress disorder, I was in a subway station in New York City, where I live. It was almost a year before the attacks of 9/11, and I’d just come back from two months in Afghanistan with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance. I was on assignment to write a profile of Massoud, who fought a desperate resistance against the Taliban until they assassinated him two days before 9/11. At one point during my trip we were on a frontline position that his forces had just taken over from the Taliban, and the inevitable counterattack started with an hour-long rocket barrage. All we could do was curl up in the trenches and hope. I felt deranged for days afterward, as if I’d lived through the end of the world.

By the time I got home, though, I wasn’t thinking about that or any of the other horrific things we’d seen; I mentally buried all of it until one day, a few months later, when I went into the subway at rush hour to catch the C train downtown. Suddenly I found myself backed up against a metal support column, absolutely convinced I was going to die. There were too many people on the platform, the trains were coming into the station too fast, the lights were too bright, the world was too loud. I couldn’t quite explain what was wrong, but I was far more scared than I’d ever been in Afghanistan.

I stood there with my back to the column until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I sprinted for the exit and walked home. I had no idea that what I’d just experienced had anything to do with combat; I just thought I was going crazy. For the next several months I kept having panic attacks whenever I was in a small place with too many people—airplanes, ski gondolas, crowded bars. Gradually the incidents stopped, and I didn’t think about them again until I found myself talking to a woman at a picnic who worked as a psychotherapist. She asked whether I’d been affected by my war experiences, and I said no, I didn’t think so. But for some reason I described my puzzling panic attack in the subway. “That’s called post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said. “You’ll be hearing a lot more about that in the next few years.” [Continue reading…]

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Navy chief tells fellow admirals to rethink integrity and behavior in aftermath of string of scandals

The Washington Post reports: the Navy has been dogged by a major corruption scandal involving an Asian defense contractor who has pleaded guilty to bribing Navy officers with cash, sex and luxury goods over a decade.

Three admirals were censured last year for accepting dinners and gifts from the contractor, Leonard Glenn Francis, a Singapore-based businessman widely known in maritime circles as “Fat Leonard.” At least two other admirals in the case remain under criminal investigation by the Justice Department. Four lower-ranking officers have pleaded guilty to corruption charges in federal court and are facing prison time.

While the corruption case has been slowly unfolding for more than two years, the Navy’s senior officer corps has had to endure other embarrassments in recent months.

In December, the Navy reprimanded a two-star admiral for getting drunk and wandering naked around a Florida beachfront hotel while attending a conference with defense contractors. In January, a one-star admiral was reprimanded and relieved of his command after an investigation found that he had spent hours watching pornography on a Navy computer while at sea.

And in March, under pressure from Congress, the Navy reluctantly denied promotion to the admiral in charge of its elite SEAL teams after the Pentagon’s inspector general determined that he had violated the law by retaliating against whistleblowers.

The Navy traditionally has set high standards for its commanding officers and makes a public announcement when they are cashiered for personal or professional lapses in conduct. Those relieved of command, however, are typically officers holding the rank of captain or commander, with admirals rarely getting into trouble. [Continue reading…]

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There’s no such thing as free will

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Stephen Cave writes: For centuries, philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will — and that losing this belief could be calamitous. Our codes of ethics, for example, assume that we can freely choose between right and wrong. In the Christian tradition, this is known as “moral liberty” — the capacity to discern and pursue the good, instead of merely being compelled by appetites and desires. The great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant reaffirmed this link between freedom and goodness. If we are not free to choose, he argued, then it would make no sense to say we ought to choose the path of righteousness.

Today, the assumption of free will runs through every aspect of American politics, from welfare provision to criminal law. It permeates the popular culture and underpins the American dream — the belief that anyone can make something of themselves no matter what their start in life. As Barack Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, American “values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will.”

So what happens if this faith erodes?

The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. Shortly after Darwin put forth his theory of evolution, his cousin Sir Francis Galton began to draw out the implications: If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties — which some people have to a greater degree than others — to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance.

Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture. Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics? Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment? Impressive evidence accumulated for the importance of each factor. Whether scientists supported one, the other, or a mix of both, they increasingly assumed that our deeds must be determined by something. [Continue reading…]

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The ex-anarchist construction worker who became a world-renowned scientist

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Daniel Gumbiner writes: “See these lichens here? I don’t know how you see them but, to me, I see them as a surrealist.”

I am sitting in the UC Riverside herbarium, speaking to Kerry Knudsen, Southern California’s only professional lichenologist. We are looking at his collection of lichens, which consists of over 16,000 individual specimens, all of them neatly organized in large green file cabinets. Knudsen has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers on lichens, and discovered more than 60 species that are new to science. It is an extraordinary output, for any scientist, but Knudsen has achieved it in only fifteen years. Science is his second career. For more than two decades he worked in construction. Before that, he was a teenage runaway living in an anarchist commune in Chicago.

“He’s amazing,” said Shirley Tucker, a retired professor of botany at LSU. “He came out of nowhere and became an expert in the most difficult genera.”

A lichen is a fungus in a symbiotic relationship with an algae or a cyanobacteria. The fungus essentially farms the algae or cyanobacteria, who are able to harvest energy from the sun through photosynthesis. In return, the fungus provides the algae or cyanobacteria with protection, but the relationship is a little one-sided.

“The algae is trapped,” Knudsen explained. “It has a lot of tubes going into it. It’s controlled by chemical signals … The first time I saw it under the microscope, I wanted to join the Algae Liberation Front. I mean, it looked bad.”

Scientists believe that lichen evolved over 500 million years ago, about the same time as fish. Although lichen make up 8 percent of the world’s biomass, they are rarely considered by the amateur naturalist, and therefore have very few common names. [Continue reading…]

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Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War

On April 18, the Middle East Institute (MEI) hosted novelist Robin Yassin-Kassab and human rights activist Leila Al-Shami for a discussion about their recent book, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, which tells the stories of Syrian civilians organizing, resisting, and surviving inside Syria since the 2011 uprising.

Burning Country explores the reality of life in present-day Syria, examining new grassroots revolutionary organizations, the rise of ISIS and Islamism, and the emergence of the worst refugee crisis since World War II. In this vivid account of a modern-day political and humanitarian nightmare, Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami give voice to a Syrian people who continue to struggle for justice.

(Note: During the recording of this discussion, Leila Al-Shami remained off camera at her request.)

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Obama ‘pleased’ with Syria policy while Kerry warns Assad about unspecified ‘Plan B’

The New York Times reports: Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, said on Tuesday that if President Bashar al-Assad of Syria continues to block access of humanitarian aid to besieged cities and towns, they were prepared to help the World Food Program airdrop food and emergency supplies.

The very fact that they had to threaten the airdrops — which are expensive and often inaccurate — amounted to an admission of how little progress has been made in achieving either the lasting cease-fire or the regular humanitarian relief that European and Arab nations, along with Iran, laid out as the first steps toward a broader peace agreement.

The threat to conduct airdrops came after a meeting in Vienna of the International Syria Support Group, made up of the nations that drafted a largely unimplemented plan to end the country’s civil war. They gathered at a low point: A once-promising “cessation of hostilities” has largely collapsed, an effort to start negotiations between the opposition and the government broke down, and there has been no progress toward negotiating a “political transition” that was supposed to begin on Aug. 1.

Bolstered by Russia’s intervention to help prop him up, Mr. Assad is in a stronger position than he has been in years, many experts say, and has rejected the idea that any new government would have to exclude him. He has the strong support of Iran, his longtime provider of security, though Russian officials seem less concerned about whether Mr. Assad himself remains in power or is replaced by another leader from his Alawite Shiite sect.

At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon with Mr. Lavrov, Mr. Kerry rejected a suggestion that, in dealing with Mr. Assad, he was operating without the kind of leverage he had in Vienna last year during the Iran nuclear negotiations — when American sanctions and sabotage of the Iranian program created the pressure that led to a deal.

But Mr. Kerry — who White House aides say has complained in Situation Room meetings about the lack of clout to force Mr. Assad to make good on his commitments — argued that the Syrian leader would be making a mistake to believe he would pay no price for refusing to cooperate.

“If President Assad has come to a conclusion there’s no Plan B,” he said, referring to more coercive action to force him to comply, “then he’s come to a conclusion that is totally without any foundation whatsoever and even dangerous.”

Mr. Kerry added later that Mr. Assad “should never make a miscalculation about President Obama’s determination to do what is right at any given moment of time, where he believes that he has to make that decision.” Mr. Assad, he said, has “flagrantly violated” the United Nations resolution calling for a nationwide cease-fire and allowing humanitarian assistance.

Yet in making public a case that there would be consequences for Mr. Assad’s intransigence, Mr. Kerry was touching on one of the hardest issues facing Mr. Obama and his national security team in their last eight months in office. The president has repeatedly defended his decision not to authorize a military strike against Mr. Assad after he crossed what Mr. Obama had described as a “red line” against using chemical weapons. He also rejected a no-fly zone to protect fleeing civilians and opposition forces.[Continue reading…]

The Daily Beast reports: White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday that President Obama was “certainly pleased” with his administration’s policy on Syria, while simultaneously acknowledging that the country now poses a “heightened risk” to America and its interests.

“We’ve seen terrible violence in Syria, it’s an awful humanitarian situation, and it’s a genuine human tragedy. And it’s a dangerous place, and it’s a place that poses a heightened risk to the United States and to our allies and interests around the world,” Earnest said.

Earnest, who was asked by Yahoo’s Olivier Knox about The Daily Beast’s reporting, argued that the president’s Syria policy had “advanced the national security interests” of the U.S., placing the blame squarely on the Assad regime.

“There’s no denying that what has happened in Syria has changed millions of lives — and not for the better. And that’s a testament to the failed political leadership of Bashar al-Assad, it’s a testament to the way the political chaos in that country has propagated so much violence,” Earnest said at Monday’s White House press briefing.

The Daily Beast reported Friday that senior White House official Ben Rhodes allegedly told Syrian-American activists that he was “not proud” of the administration’s policy on Syria. [Continue reading…]

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The importance of bearing witness to Syria’s war

Caitlin L Chandler writes: The wound in the middle of the man’s arm is a large circle of ribbed red blood and tendon, the edges of the flesh curving up and out like petals. Metal prongs inserted into the skin on either side of the wound hold his arm in place; his chest rises and falls with each breath.

To observe surgery up close is at first disorienting and surreal, like watching a perfectly shot film in the cinema and then walking through the screen to realize there is no such thing – only machines and people creating the images that were streaming as reality before you. I do not normally see bodies in disrepair that are being painstakingly stitched back together; I feel like I’m trespassing on something sacred.

The Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) trauma hospital in Ramtha, Jordan, is located 3 miles (5km) from the Syrian border. From the roof of MSF’s house, where its international staff live, you can see the blue-green hills that demarcate the border, stretching between the two countries like a gentle wave. Once you could have strolled in those hills, or laid down in the grass and daydreamed.

At night on the roof the lights of nearby Irbid glitter, some of them marking the apartments where thousands of urban refugees dwell, waiting for the war to end, for resettlement or for the chance to try to make their way across the ocean to Europe. Everyone is waiting – to see whether the fragile cease-fire matters and whether the E.U. will continue to turn its back on the men, women and children drowning in its seas. In Ramtha, they are waiting for a medical outcome.

As a humanitarian affairs officer with MSF, part of my job is to understand and construct here in Jordan how MSF practices temoignage – the act of witnessing. Since MSF’s inception, witnessing has been intertwined with the organization’s medical activities, which often occur in contexts where MSF is one of the only organizations to see at first hand the effects of conflict and disaster. It is what always set MSF apart for me from other organizations; although I know witnessing can be an imperfect offering, it at least implies responsibility.

To witness the effects of war is to witness what you cannot change; it is to observe mutilated bodies and sense the dislocation that comes with forced exile. It is to reflect on what meaning you can make in life when you are here, alive, and so many others are dead. For years I did not want to do an MSF mission because I thought it was not the real world, that it would change me in ways I did not want, but now I know that was fear. On the other side of fear is the world; it is still there, whether you choose to look at it or not. [Continue reading…]

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William deBuys: No more wide open spaces?

One summer 43 years ago, I headed west with a photographer friend, interviewing Americans at minor league baseball parks, fairgrounds, tourist spots, campgrounds, wherever the moment and our Volkswagen van took us.  Grandiosely enough, our goal was “to tap the mood of the nation,” which led to my first book, Beyond Our Control: America in the Mid Seventies.  Looking back, I now realize that, in 1973, three decades ahead of schedule, we met the precursors to the Tea Party movement, angry and unnerved white Americans of a certain age, camped out in their RVs and distinctly dyspeptic about where this country was going.  This was a crowd, as I wrote at the time, that when it came to the lifestyles they had known and enjoyed could already “feel the tremors under their feet” and I predicted that one of these days they would be the ones to suffer.  “You can bet,” I observed, that “America’s corporate pushers won’t be going through the same sort of withdrawal pains as their victims.”  And I added, “What makes it so frightening is this: When these people find themselves desperate, they may panic and grab for the first help in sight, and I’m afraid to think what that will be.”  All these decades later, we may finally have a better idea of what that, in fact, is.

As it happened, for this born and bred New York City boy for whom Central Park was the wilderness, there was another unforgettable aspect of that journey from coast to coast.  I saw up close and personal something of the West, of lands that seemed to stretch out toward eternity, that could take your breath away, and that, as TomDispatch regular William deBuys points out today, still — though for how long we don’t know — belong to all of us.  Of our visit to Yellowstone Park (where the warnings about grizzlies in the campgrounds touched off the panic button in this urbanite), I wrote:

“Early this afternoon, we rested by a lake and watched a Swainson’s hawk hover and hunt, all its energy focused on a few yards of field. Suddenly, it plummeted out of sight, rose with a field mouse in its claws and was gone.  Yellowstone’s been like that, just the opposite of our expectations.  Gigantic, wild-looking, beautiful. The roads don’t even dent it, at least in the eastern part where we’ve come in. Strangest of all, it’s not crawling with people.  We didn’t see anybody until we pulled into the parking lot of the Hamilton General Store.”

And here’s a small miracle: in this era of privatization — even the military now goes into its war zones with a set of corporate warriors in tow — those awesome American lands are still ours, still public.  My children can still spend time in them and appreciate a world they would otherwise have no access to.  But my grandson when he grows up?  Who knows?  As deBuys makes clear today, behind the latest wing-nuts of the American West lie corporate interests that, in this age of growing inequality, might someday take part in one of the great land grabs of modern times.  Fortunately, there are still writers like deBuys to remind us of just what’s at stake. Tom Engelhardt

Privatizing America’s public land
How the raid on Malheur screened a future raid on real estate
By William deBuys

It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts.

Away out West, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the trouble is deep, widespread, and won’t soon go away. Last winter’s armed take-over and 41-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if they hadn’t been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called “terrorists” and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownership — or at least that of their leaders, since they weren’t exactly a band of intellectuals — was only loosely linked to reality.

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Donald Trump’s war on the media threatens fundamental American principles

Peter Beinart writes: On Saturday, Donald Trump ally and confidante Roger Stone declared that CNN “is not a news organization but an advocacy group” and that “when Donald Trump is president, he should turn off their FCC license.” (Full disclosure: I’m a CNN contributor.)

In any other election year, that would be news. But this cycle, Trump and his campaign have threatened the press in so many unprecedented ways that they’ve overloaded the system. The press itself can’t keep up. The day before Stone’s comments, Trump implied that he’d retaliate against The Washington Post’s critical coverage of him by going after its owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has been “getting away with murder, tax-wise” and has a “huge antitrust problem.” In March, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was arrested on misdemeanor battery charges for grabbing Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields at a campaign rally. (The charges were later dropped.) In February, Trump declared, “If I win … I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they [journalists] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” In January, the Trump campaign barred New York Times reporters from covering campaign events after the Times published an unflattering story about his ground operation. (At various times, Team Trump has also barred reporters from National Review, The Des Moines Register, Univision, BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, Fusion, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and Politico, sometimes in explicit retaliation for negative coverage.)

There’s more. Trump has publicly called the journalists who cover him “scum” on at least two occasions. Last July, when The Daily Beast ran a piece about sexual-assault accusations by Trump’s ex-wife, Michael Cohen — executive vice-president at the Trump Organization — told the reporters who wrote it that “what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting … I’m going to mess your life up.” As Vice’s Olivia Becker has noted, “Trump is the only presidential candidate whose rallies feature a specific area in the back where journalists are corralled and not permitted to leave. Other candidates have areas designated for the media, but reporters are free to mingle in the crowd to interview people. Leaving the press pen at a Trump rally [by contrast] comes with its own risk.” In February, when a Time magazine journalist tried to leave the pen to photograph protesters being ejected, a secret-service agent grabbed him by the neck and slammed him to the ground. [Continue reading…]

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Hell on Earth: Life under ISIS in Libya

The Daily Beast reports: Amjad bin Sasi was a young man who enjoyed Western clothing, a fashionable haircut, and even the odd drink.

When ISIS seized control of his hometown of Sirte on Libya’s Mediterranean coast last year, bin Sasi was one of tens of thousands consigned to living in hell on Earth. His torment lasted less than a year—he was shot in the back of the head by an ISIS executioner at the age of 23.

The crime for which he was arrested? Cursing.

This is the reality of life under the control of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Libya, according to a report by Human Rights Watch, which includes allegations of crimes against humanity, war crimes, mutilation, beatings, and extra-judicial killings.

The U.S. military has drawn up plans for an assault on the ISIS stronghold, but President Obama has refused to sanction any military intervention.

The residents of Sirte live in constant fear of being caught breaking the strict codes of conduct imposed by their ISIS rulers. Every neighbor could be an informant for the Hisba morality police, and harsh penalties are routinely handed down by religious judges after unfair trials.

“Life is hell for people in Sirte,” Letta Tayler, the author of the HRW report, told The Daily Beast. “People told me they are living in constant fear. Many of the men and women I interviewed in Misrata [a nearby city] started crying when they spoke about having to go back because they had no place to go. People were living in absolute terror.”

One of the extraordinary things about life in this ISIS outpost is that even those who bow their heads and follow the hardline rules are forced to live in misery. [Continue reading…]

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