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For that reason alone, Moore’s film is highly worthwhile regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant defect in U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom – of decades-old systemic American pathologies.

Personalizing and isolating Trump as the principal, even singular, source of political evil is obfuscating and thus deceitful. By effect, if not design, it distracts the population’s attention away from the actual architects of their plight.

This now-dominant framework misleads people into the nationalistic myth – at once both frightening and comforting – that prior to 2016’s “Fahrenheit 11/9,” the U.S., though quite imperfect and saddled with “flaws,” was nonetheless a fundamentally kind, benevolent, equitable and healthy democracy, one which, by aspiration if not always in action, welcomed immigrants, embraced diversity, strove for greater economic equality, sought to defend human rights against assaults by the world’s tyrants, was governed by the sturdy rule of law rather than the arbitrary whims of rulers, elected fundamentally decent even if ideologically misguided men to the White House, and gradually expanded rather than sadistically abolished opportunity for the world’s neediest.

But suddenly, teaches this fairy tale as ominous music plays in the background, a villain unlike any we had previously known invaded our idyllic land, vandalized our sacred public spaces, degraded our admired halls of power, threatened our collective values. It was only upon Trump’s assumption of power that the nation’s noble aspirations were repudiated in favor of a far darker and more sinister vision, one wholly alien to “Who We Are”: a profoundly “un-American” tapestry of plutocracy, kleptocracy, autocracy, xenophobia, racism, elite lawlessness, indifference and even aggressive cruelty toward the most vulnerable and marginalized.

This myth is not just false but self-evidently so. Yet it persists, and thrives, because it serves so many powerful interests at once. Most importantly, it exonerates, empowers, and elevates the pre-Trump ruling class, now recast as heroic leaders of the #Resistance and nostalgic symbols of America’s pre-11/9 Goodness.

The lie-fueled destruction of Vietnam and Iraq, the worldwide torture regime, the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent bailout and protection of those responsible for it, the foreign kidnapping and domestic rounding up of Muslims, the record-setting Obama-era deportations and whistleblower prosecutions, the obliteration of Yemen and Libya, the embrace of Mubarak, Sisi, and Saudi despots, the years of bipartisan subservience to Wall Street at everyone else’s expense, the full-scale immunity vested on all the elites responsible for all those crimes – it’s all blissfully washed away as we unite to commemorate the core decency of America as George Bush gently hands a piece of candy to Michelle Obama at the funeral of the American War Hero and Trump-opponent-in-words John S. McCain, or as hundreds of thousands of us re-tweet the latest bromide of Americana from the leaders of America’s most insidious security state, spy and police agencies.

In NYC to meet with my publisher. Hope leadership book will be useful. Reassuring to see Lady Liberty standing tall even in rough weather. pic.twitter.com/KIjb29k2Cg

— James Comey (@Comey) December 6, 2017

Beyond nationalistic myth-building, there are substantial commercial, political and reputational benefits to this Trump-centered mythology. An obsessive fixation on Trump has single-handedly saved an entire partisan cable news network from extinction, converting its once ratings-starved, close-to-being-fired prime-time hosts into major celebrities with contracts so obscenely lucrative as to produce envy among most professional athletes or Hollywood stars.

Resistance grifters exploit fears of Trump to build massive social media followings that are easily converted into profit from well-meaning, manipulated dupes. One rickety, unhinged, rant-filled, speculation-driven Trump book after the next dominates the best-seller lists, enriching charlatans and publishing companies alike: the more conspiratorial, the better. Anti-Trump mania is big business, and – as the record-shattering first-week sales of Bob Woodward’s new Trump book demonstrates – there is no end in sight to this profiteering.

All of this is historical revisionism in its crudest and most malevolent form. It’s intended to heap most if not all blame for systemic, enduring, entrenched suffering across the country onto a single personality who wielded no political power until 18 months ago. In doing so, it averts everyone’s eyes away from the real culprits: the governors, both titled and untitled, of the establishment ruling class, who for decades have exercised largely unchecked power – immune even from election outcomes – and, in many senses, still do.

WATCH: Bipartisanship: Laura Bush, via President Bush, hands a piece of candy to Michelle Obama during the memorial service for John McCain. pic.twitter.com/PhKPYCOiUz

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 1, 2018

The message is as clear as the beneficial outcomes: Just look only at Trump. Keep your eyes fixated on him. Direct all your suffering, deprivations, fears, resentments, anger and energy to him and him alone. By doing so, you’ll forget about us – except that we’ll join you in your Trump-centered crusade, even lead you in it, and you will learn again to love us: the real authors of your misery.

The overriding value of “Fahrenheit 11/9” is that it avoids – in fact, aggressively rejects – this ahistorical manipulation. Moore dutifully devotes a few minutes at the start of his film to Trump’s rise, and then asks the question that dominates the rest of it, the one the political and media establishment has steadfastly avoided examining except in the most superficial and self-protective ways: “how the fuck did this happen”?

Knowing that no political work can be commercially successful on a large-scale without affirming Resistance clichés, Moore dutifully complies, but only with the most cursory and fleeting gestures: literally 5 seconds in the film are devoted to assigning  blame for Hillary’s loss to Putin and Comey. With that duty discharged, he sets his sights on his real targets: the U.S. political establishment that is ensconced within both parties, along with the financial elites who own and control both of them for their own ends.

Moore quickly escapes the dreary and misleading “Democrat v. GOP” framework that dominates cable news by trumpeting “the largest political party in America”: those who refuse to vote. He uses this powerful graphic to tell that story:

It’s remarkable how little attention is paid to non-voters given that, as Moore rightly notes, they form America’s largest political faction. Part of why they’re ignored is moralism: those who don’t vote deserve no attention as they have only themselves to blame.

But the much more consequential factor is the danger for both parties from delving too deeply into this subject. After all, voter apathy arises when people conclude that their votes don’t change their lives, that election outcomes improve nothing, that the small amount of time spent waiting in line at a voting booth isn’t worth the effort because of how inconsequential it is. What greater indictment of the two political parties can one imagine than that?

One of the most illuminating pieces of reporting about the 2016 election is also, not coincidentally, one of the most ignored: interviews by the New York Times with white and African-American working-class voters in Milwaukee who refused to vote and – even knowing that Trump won Wisconsin, and thus the presidency, largely because of their decision – don’t regret it. “Milwaukee is tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway,” the article quotes an African-American barber, justifying his decision not to vote in 2016 after voting twice for Obama.

Moore develops the same point, even more powerfully, about his home state of Michigan, which – like Wisconsin – Trump also won after Obama won it twice. In one of the most powerful and devastating passages from the film – indeed, of any political documentary seen in quite some time – “Fahrenheit 11/9” takes us in real-time through the indescribably shameful water crisis of Flint, the criminal cover-up of it by GOP Governor Rick Snyder, and the physical and emotional suffering endured by its poor, voiceless, and overwhelmingly black residents.

After many months of abuse, of being lied to, of being poisoned, Flint residents, in May, 2016, finally had a cause for hope: President Obama announced that he would visit Flint to address the water crisis. As Air Force One majestically lands, Flint residents rejoice, believing that genuine concern, political salvation, and drinkable water had finally arrived.

Exactly the opposite happened. Obama delivered a speech in which he not only appeared to minimize, but to mock, concerns of Flint residents over the lead levels in their water, capped off by a grotesquely cynical political stunt where he flamboyantly insisted on having a glass of filtered tap water that he then pretended to drink, but in fact only used to wet his lips, ingesting none of it.

A friendly meeting with Gov. Snyder after that – during which Obama repeated the same water stunt – provided the GOP state administration in Michigan with ample Obama quotes to exploit to prove the problem was fixed, and for Flint residents, it was the final insult. “When President Obama came here,” an African-American community leader in Flint tells Moore, “he was my President. When he left, he wasn’t.”

Like the unregretful non-voters of Milwaukee, the collapsed hope Obama left in his wake as he departed Flint becomes a key metaphor in Moore’s hands for understanding Trump’s rise. Moore suggests to John Podesta, who seems to agree, that Hillary lost Michigan because, as in Wisconsin, voters, in part after seeing what Obama did in Flint, concluded it was no longer worth voting. As Moore narrates:

The autocrat, the strongman, only succeeds when the vast majority of the population decides they’ve seen enough, and give up. .  . . . The worst thing that President Obama did was pave the way for Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump did not just fall from the sky. The road to him was decades in the making.

The long, painful, extraordinarily compelling journey through Flint is accompanied by an equally illuminating immersion in West Virginia, one that brings into further vivid clarity the misery, deprivation, and repression that drove so many people – for good reason – away from the political establishment and into the arms of anyone promising to destroy it: from the 2008 version of Obama to Bernie Sanders to Jill Stein to Donald Trump to abstaining entirely from voting.

We meet the teachers who led the inspiring state-wide strike, some of whom are paid so little that they are on food stamps. We hear how their own union leaders tried (and failed) first to prevent the strike, then prematurely tried (and failed) to end it with trivial concessions.

We meet Richard Ojeda, an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran, Democratic State Senator, and current Congressional candidate, who tells Moore: “Our town is dying. One out of every four homes is in a dilapidated state . . . . I can take you five minutes from here and show you where our kids have it worse than the kids I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Needless to say, all of that began and took root long before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015.

To Moore’s credit, virtually no powerful U.S. factions escape indictment in “Fahrenheit 11/9.” The villains of Flint and West Virginia are two Republican governors. But their accomplices, every step of the way, are Democrats. This, Moore ultimately argues, is precisely why people had lost faith in the ability of elections generally, and the Democratic Party specifically, to improve their lives.

And in stark and impressive contrast to the endless intra-Democrat war over the primacy of race versus class, Moore adeptly demonstrates that the overwhelmingly African-American population of Flint and the largely white impoverished West Virginians have far more in common than they have differences: from the methods of their repression to those responsible for it. “Fahrenheit 11/9” does not shy away from, but unflinchingly confronts, the questions of race and class in America and ultimately concludes – and proves – that they are inextricably intertwined, that a discussion of (and solution to) one is impossible without a discussion of (and solution to) the other.

No examination of voter apathy and the perceived irrelevance of elections would be complete without an ample study of the 2016 Democratic Party primary process that led to Hillary Clinton’s ultimately doomed nomination. And this is another area where Moore excels. Focusing on one little-known but amazing fact – that Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties over Clinton in the West Virginia primary, beating her by 16 points in a state where she crushed Obama in 2008, yet, at the Democratic Convention, somehow ended up with fewer delegates than she received – Moore interviews a Sanders supporter in West Virginia about the message this bizarre discrepancy sent.

Moore asks: “This just tells people to stay home?” The voter replies: “I think so.” Moore offers his own conclusion through narration: “When the people are continually told that their vote doesn’t count, that it doesn’t matter, and they end up believing that, the loss of faith in our democracy becomes our deathknell.”

With all of this harrowing and depressing evidence compiled, it becomes easier and easier to understand why Americans are either receptive to anyone vowing to dismantle rather than uphold the system they have rightly come to despise, or just abstain altogether. And it becomes even easier to understand why the guardians of that system view Trump as the most valuable weapon they could have ever imagined wielding: one that allows them to direct everyone’s attention away from the systemic damage they have wrought for decades.

Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of political films. There are those whose filmmaker fully shares your political outlook, mentality and ideology, and thus produces a film that, in each scene, validates and strengthens your views. There are those by filmmakers whose politics are so anathema to yours that you find no value in the film and are only repelled by it. Then there are those that do a combination of all those things, causing you to love parts, hate other parts, and feel unsure about the rest.

Without doubt, “Fahrenheit 11/9” falls into the latter category. It’s literally impossible to imagine someone who would love, or hate, all of the scenes and messages of this film.

Indeed, for all the praise I just heaped on it, there were several parts I found banal, meandering, misguided and, in one case, downright loathsome: a lurid, pointless, reckless, and deeply offensive digression into the long-standing, adolescent #Resistance theme that Trump wants to have sex with, if he has not in fact already had sex with, his own daughter, Ivanka. What makes the inclusion of this trash all the more tragic is that it comes very near the beginning of the film, and thus will almost certainly repel – for good reasons – large numbers of people, including more reluctant and open-minded Trump supporters, who would be otherwise quite receptive to the important parts of the film that constitute its crux.

Then there is the last 20 minutes, devoted to a direct comparison between Trump and Hitler. I am not someone who opposes the use of Nazism as a window for understanding contemporary political developments. To the contrary, I’ve written previously about how anti-intellectual and dangerous is the now-standard internet decree (inaccurately referred to as Godwin’s Law) that Nazi comparisons are and should be off-limits.

As the Nuremberg prosecutors (one of whom appears in the film) themselves pointed out during the post-war trial of Nazis: those tribunals were not primarily about punishing war criminals but about establishing principles to prevent future occurrences. There are real and substantive lessons to be drawn from the rise of Hitler when it comes to understanding the ascension of contemporary global movements of authoritarianism, and this last part of “Fahrenheit 11/9” features some of those in a reasonably responsible and informative manner.

Ultimately, though, this last part of the film is marred by cheap and manipulative stunts, the worst of which is combining video of a Hitler speech overlaid with audio of a Trump speech, with no real effort made to justify this equation. Comparing any political figure to someone who oversaw the genocide of millions of human beings requires great care, sensitivity, and intellectual sophistication, and there is sadly little of that in Moore’s invocation (which at times feels like exploitation) of Nazism.

There are, without doubt, people who will most love the exact parts of the film I most disliked. And those same people will likely hate many of the parts I found most compelling. But that’s precisely why Moore’s film is so worth your time no matter your ideology, so worth enduring even the parts that you will find disagreeable or even infuriating.

Because – in contrast to the endless armies of cable news hosts, Twitter pundits, #Resistance grifters, and party operatives, all of whom are vested due to self-interest in perpetuating the same deceitful, simple-minded and obfuscating narrative – Moore, for most of this film, is at least trying. And what he’s trying is of unparalleled importance: not to take the cheap route of exclusively denouncing Trump but to take the more complicated, challenging, and productive route of understanding who and what created the climate in which Trump could thrive.

Embedded in the instruction of those who want to you focus exclusively on Trump is an insidious and toxic message: namely, removing Trump will cure, or at least mitigate, the acute threats he poses. That is a fraud, and Moore knows it. Unless and until the roots of these pathologies are identified and addressed, we are certain to have more Trumps: in fact, more effective and more dangerous Trumps, along with more potent Dutertes, and more Brexits, and more Bolsonaros and more LePens.

Moore could have easily made a film that just channeled and fueled standard anti-Trump fears and animus and – like the others who are doing that – made lots of money, been widely hailed, and won lots of accolades. He chose instead to dig deeper, to be more honest, to take the harder route, and deserves real credit for that.

He did that, it seems clear, because he knows that the only way to move forward is not just to reject right-wing demagoguery but also the sham that masquerades as its #Resistance. As Moore himself put it: “sometimes it takes a Donald Trump to get us to realize that we have to get rid of the whole rotten system that gave us Trump.”

That’s exactly the truth that the guardians of that “whole rotten system” want most to conceal. Moore’s film is devoted, at its core, to unearthing it. That’s why, despite its flaws, some of them serious ones, the film deserves wide attention and discussion among everyone across the political spectrum.

The post Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9” Aims Not at Trump But at Those Who Created the Conditions That Led to His Rise appeared first on The Intercept.

Brazilian President Michel Temer delivers a statement on May 20, 2017 in Brasilia, Brazil.

The head of the center-right party who was backed by the establishment in the 2014 election and almost beat Dilma, Sen. Aécio Neves, has since been caught receiving bribes and even suggesting violence against witnesses. Disgraced even within his own party, Neves is running for a seat in the lower House just to stay out of prison (federal lawmakers in Brazil are immune from criminal prosecution while in office), and recently launched that desperate campaign to a crowd of 20 people. Meanwhile, in a cruel irony, Dilma is running for the Senate seat Aécio was forced to vacate, and polls show her likely to win (provided her candidacy isn’t banned by the judiciary).

Add to all of that the bizarre fact that the clear poll leader — Lula, the country’s former two-term president — is virtually certain to have his candidacy judicially barred due to the fact that he’s currently in prison after a criminal corruption conviction: the result of a judicial process that even many of his critics who believe him to be corrupt regard as a highly flawed and politically motivated trial and appeal. If Lula were to run, it is close to certain that he would win.

Trying to leverage that popularity, Lula’s Worker’s Party (PT) continues to pretend that he will be their candidate, hoping that once he is barred by the courts, as everyone knows is inevitable, then he will be able to use the resulting anger to anoint former São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad, now officially Lula’s vice presidential candidate. But there are great doubts about whether Lula will have the power — from a prison cell in Curitiba, barred from giving press interviews — to simply transfer his votes to his chosen candidate who lacks Lula’s singular charisma and national name-recognition.

All of this confusion and uncertainty has created a huge opening for an actually fascist member of Congress, former Army Captain Jair Bolsonaro, whom the western media often refers to as “Brazil’s Trump” but is, in fact, far closer to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte or even Egypt’s Abdel el-Sisi in his fondness for military rule, indiscriminate police violence, torture and summary executions. The conventional wisdom is that Bolsonaro’s 20 percent of the vote will be enough to bring him to the run-off, but that his high disapproval ratings ensure he will lose to anyone who makes it there with him (similar to Marine LePen’s dynamic in France). In the era of Trump and Brexit, such confidence is misplaced, but even if Bolsonaro does not enter the Presidential Palace this year, he will wield significant influence with his 20 percent support and his three equally fascist sons in public office, one of whom is currently in Congress and the other on his way to the Federal Senate this year.

The widespread expectation is that Bolsonaro will make the run-off (the only candidate who can stop him — the center-right, corruption-tainted, establishment-backed, charisma-free Governor Geraldo Alckmin — has stagnated all year despite every institutional advantage). The real race, then, is for second place: everyone is eager to be the alternative to Bolsonaro, behind whom all non-extremists will presumably coalesce.

One of the leading contenders for that second spot is the Democratic Labor Party (PDT)’s Ciro Gomes, a mostly left-wing politician who insists, for strategic reasons, on being called “center-left.” Gomes is a remarkable paradox in many ways. For one, he has been at the highest levels of Brazilian politics for decades — as mayor, as governor of Ceará, a large and poor state in the Northeast, a minister in two prior presidential administrations, including Lula’s successful first term — yet has the comportment of, and is widely perceived as being, an outsider and somewhat of a rebel. He is also extremely erudite and well-educated, a professor of Constitutional Law who has studied at Harvard, yet styles himself as a plain-talking “man of the people” who has become notorious among Brazil’s conservative media for his “unpresidential” behavior and temperament.

Despite all this chaos, polls have been remarkably stable over the past several months. Without Lula, Bolsonaro is the clear leader with roughly 20-22 percent of the vote, while second place (in the range of 8-10 percent) has been jointly occupied by Gomes along with Marina Silva (pictured, below), the hard-to-ideologically-pigeonhole, black evangelical environmentalist from the Amazon with a remarkable personal story (growing up in great poverty, she was illiterate until the age of 16, then became a highly effective college professor and policy expert who served as Environmental Minister under Lula but then, after being eliminated before the run-off in the 2014 presidential election, endorsed Aécio over Dilma). Both Gomes and Silva have run for President twice before.

Marina Silva confronts Jair Bolsonaro is a recent televised presidential debate.

Over the weekend in São Paulo, I sat down with Gomes for a wide-ranging interview about Brazil’s political dynamic, its various crises, the situation with Lula and the corruption probe, and other controversial social issues such as drug decriminalization, gender inequality, and teaching children in public schools about homophobia and LGBT equality. We also discussed the similarities between Brazil’s political climate and its rising far-right movement with those in Europe and the U.S.

We have edited the interview with English subtitles into a 15-minute video that features the discussions most relevant to an international audience, precisely because Brazil’s election — aside from being inherently important due to the sheer size of the country — offers insights for the challenges of western democracies. We will do the same for the other interviews of Brazil’s presidential candidates we do, including the one I did previously with the left-wing socialist candidate Guilherme Boulos of the PSOL party.

Whatever else one might think of him, Gomes is a very astute and insightful thinker, and his answers offer insight not only into the Brazilian election but the challenges of liberalism and democracy generally throughout the western world:

The post Interview With One of Brazil’s Leading Presidential Candidates, Ciro Gomes appeared first on The Intercept.

Correa also responded to a widely discussed Guardian article yesterday, which claimed that “Ecuador bankrolled a multimillion-dollar spy operation to protect and support Julian Assange in its central London embassy.” The former president mocked the story as highly “sensationalistic,” accusing The Guardian of seeking to depict routine and modest embassy security measures as something scandalous or unusual.

On March 27, Assange’s internet access at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London was cut off by Ecuadorian officials, who also installed jamming devices to prevent Assange from accessing the internet using other means of connection. Assange’s previously active Twitter account has had no activity since then, nor have any journalists been able to communicate with him. All visitors to the embassy have also been denied access to Assange, who was formally made a citizen of Ecuador earlier this year.

Assange has been confined to the embassy for almost six years, when Ecuador granted him asylum in August 2012. The grant of asylum was made on the grounds that Assange’s extradition to Sweden for a sexual assault investigation would likely result in being sent to the U.S. for prosecution, where he could face the death penalty.

From the start, Ecuador told both the U.K. and Swedish governments that it would immediately send Assange to Stockholm in exchange for a pledge from Sweden not to use that as a pretext to extradite him to the U.S., something the Swedish government had the power to do but refused.

Correa also emphasized that Ecuador, from the start, told Swedish investigators that they were welcome to interrogate Assange in their embassy, but almost five years elapsed before Swedish prosecutors — in 2016 — finally did so. Citing those facts, a United Nations panel ruled in 2016 that the actions of the U.K. government constituted “arbitrary detention” and a violation of Assange’s fundamental human rights, a decision British officials quickly said they intended to ignore.

Despite the fact that Swedish prosecutors dropped its sex crimes investigation last May (not because they concluded Assange was innocent, but because they believed further efforts to bring him to Sweden were futile), U.K. authorities have vowed to arrest him on what it claims are bail violations.

The danger for Assange thus remains high if were to leave the embassy, particularly in light of a highly threatening speech given last year by Mike Pompeo, then U.S. President Donald Trump’s CIA director and now his secretary of state, in which he labeled WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” denied that its publication of documents is protected by the First Amendment, and vowed that “to give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”

In January, doctors who examined Assange inside the embassy warned that continued confinement posed grave threats to both his physical and mental health. Assange’s mother said earlier this week that his health was “rapidly deteriorating” and had become “extremely dangerous.”

Correa cited those facts, as well as Ecuador’s legal obligations under international law to asylees, to denounce Ecuador’s denial of visitors to Assange as “basically torture.” Denial of visitors is, Correa said, “a clear violation of his rights. Once we give asylum to someone, we are responsible for his safety, for ensuring humane living conditions.” But “without communications to the outside world and visits from anyone, the government is basically attacking Julian’s mental health.”

The ex-president said he believed it could be appropriate to limit Assange’s communications if he were acting “irresponsibly” by interfering in another country’s politics. During the 2016 U.S. election, Correa said, his own government told Assange that it thought his attacks on Hillary Clinton were becoming excessive and briefly suspended his internet connection to underline its concerns.

“But that was just temporary,” said Correa. “We never intended to take away his internet for an extended period of time. That is going way too far.” Correa’s Foreign Affairs Minister Guillaume Long similarly said in an interview with The Guardian earlier this morning that he, too, believed that the denial of visitors to Assange and the blocking of his internet access for this long — believed to be due to Assange’s frequent tweeting over the Catalan independence movement in Spain — was unjust.

As for reports that Ecuador is negotiating with the U.K. government to turn over Assange, Correa said that he had no knowledge of those discussions, but said it would be “unthinkable” for Ecuador to do so without first obtaining enforceable protections for Assange’s rights, including not having the U.K. government use the bail violations as a pretext to hand over Assange to the U.S.

Emphasizing that the U.S. government has made clear that it wants to prosecute Assange for publishing newsworthy material under statutes that allow for the death penalty, Correa said any such deal that did not include protections against extradition to the U.S. would be “a terrible betrayal, a violation of the rules of asylum, and a breach of Ecuador’s responsibility to protect the safety and welfare of Julian Assange.”

During his presidency, Correa was particularly assertive about defending the sovereignty of his country from intrusions by more powerful states, particularly the U.S. In 2007, he ordered a U.S. military base on Ecuadorian soil closed unless the U.S. was willing to allow Ecuador the reciprocal right to establish a military base in Miami.

But earlier this month, Correa’s successor, the current Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno, announced that it had “recently signed an agreement focused on security cooperation [with the U.S.] which implies sharing information, intelligence topics and experiences in the fight against illegal drug trafficking and fighting transnational organized crime.” Many in Ecuador viewed that as a prelude to a return to the days when the U.S. dominated Ecuador, including with new military bases, a suspicion Moreno’s government denies.

But to Correa, Moreno is returning Ecuador to the days when it was subservient to the dictates of the U.S. government. “Everyone in Latin America knows what this agreement with the U.S. means control, intervention, spying,” he said. Given the submissive posture of the current Ecuadorian president, Correa said it would not shock him if they submitted to American and British demands regarding Assange. Correa also cited the Moreno government’s recent decision to terminate peace talks between the Colombian government and rebels on Ecuadorian soil, which the ex-president believes was done at the behest of the U.S.

As for the “spying” allegations in the Guardian article, Correa said that the newspaper took a customary and standard security arrangement, and tried to make it appear sinister and scandalous. “Of course we provided security to Assange in the embassy,” Correa said. “It was our duty under the law to do so. We had the U.K. government threatening to break into the embassy. We spent what amounts to a small amount of money to provide security.”

Correa said that unlike the U.S., which surrounds its embassies with massive military protection, Ecuador does not have the means to do that. “So, when we have special security needs, we hire private firms to provide it. There is nothing unusual about this. It would have been a violation of our duties if we did not.” Correa said his government hired a well-known security firm based in Spain, UC Global, to provide those services, but the current government replaced it with an Israeli firm. “But those services are still being provided by the current government,” Correa said.

As for The Guardian’s claim that Assange himself breached Ecuadorian cybersecurity systems to read emails and documents from Ecuadorian officials, Correa said the claim seemed “absurd,” adding that The Guardian “presented no evidence for this, just an anonymous source.” Conceding that it was possible that Assange had managed to hack into various government systems, he emphasized that he had no knowledge that any such spying by Assange had taken place nor has he seen any evidence for this claim.

The former president stressed that he had been given virtually no chance to respond to The Guardian’s allegations before publication of its article. “They sent it to some email address in Ecuador very shortly before they published the story,” said Correa, who is currently in Belgium. “I did not see the email until after the story was published. They seemed to want to make a sensationalized story, not any serious report to find out the truth.” Correa said he would provide The Intercept with the email sent by The Guardian; upon receipt from Correa, this article will be updated to include it.

Correa continues to believe that asylum for Assange is not only legally valid, but also obligatory. “We don’t agree with everything Assange has done or what he says,” Correa said. “And we never wanted to impede the Swedish investigation. We said all along that he would go to Sweden immediately in exchange for a promise not to extradite him to the U.S., but they would never give that. And we knew they could have questioned him in our embassy, but they refused for years to do so.” The fault for the investigation not proceeding lies, he insists, with the Swedish and British governments.

But now that Assange has asylum, Correa is adamant that the current government is bound by domestic and international law to protect his well-being and safety. Correa was scathing in his denunciation of the treatment Assange is currently receiving, viewing it as a byproduct of Moreno’s inability or unwillingness to have Ecuador act like a sovereign and independent country.

Top photo: Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, makes a statement from a balcony of the Equador Embassy in London on Aug. 19, 2012.

The post Ecuador’s Ex-President Rafael Correa Denounces Treatment of Julian Assange as “Torture” appeared first on The Intercept.

Two GOP senators appear unlikely to vote for Haspel: John McCain, whose illness prevents him from attending, and Rand Paul, who has vowed to oppose Haspel (though few things have proven less reliable than Rand Paul’s promises to act on his supposed principles). That means that Democrats have the power to block a torturer and evidence-destroyer from becoming Trump’s CIA director — if they remain united in their opposition.

Will they do so? It is difficult to be optimistic, to put that mildly. The history of Democrats throughout the war on terror is to ensure that just enough members of their caucus join with the GOP majority to ensure passage of even the most extremist pieces of legislation or nominees justified in the name of terrorism or national security.

The ruse Democrats typically use to accomplish these dirty deeds is quite ingenious: The defectors change so that no one member bears the blame for enabling right-wing measures, while the party itself is able to claim that a majority opposed the extremism. In 2010 — as the Bush-era tactic of Democratic defections to the GOP continued under Barack Obama — I referred to this tactic as “Villain Rotation” and described it this way:

The primary tactic in this game is Villain Rotation.  They always have a handful of Democratic Senators announce that they will be the ones to deviate this time from the ostensible party position and impede success, but the designated Villain constantly shifts, so the Party itself can claim it supports these measures while an always-changing handful of their members invariably prevent it.  One minute, it’s Jay Rockefeller as the Prime Villain leading the way in protecting Bush surveillance programs and demanding telecom immunity; the next minute, it’s Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer joining hands and “breaking with their party” to ensure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General; then it’s Big Bad Joe Lieberman single-handedly blocking Medicare expansion; then it’s Blanche Lincoln and Jim Webb joining with Lindsey Graham to support the de-funding of civilian trials for Terrorists; and now that they can’t blame Lieberman or Ben Nelson any longer on health care (since they don’t need 60 votes), Jay Rockefeller voluntarily returns to the Villain Role, stepping up to put an end to the pretend-movement among Senate Democrats to enact the public option via reconciliation.

If Haspel is confirmed, it will be because a certain number of Democratic senators join with the GOP caucus to support her, while allowing the Democratic Party to claim it tried to stop her by pointing to a majority of futile Democratic votes against her. That’s why the record of the Democratic Party over the last 17 years — providing whatever amount of support is needed for GOP war on terror policies — makes it difficult to believe that Democrats will unite to kill her nomination.

The prospect of united Democratic opposition to Trump’s CIA nominee is further complicated by the vocal support for Haspel coming not only from the CIA itself — which has been running what amounts to a domestic propaganda campaign on her behalf — but also from the most admired Democratic Party intelligence and military officials.

Despite her role in the CIA torture program — or perhaps because of it — Haspel has been showered with praise, and her confirmation urged, by a bipartisan cast of intelligence officials that includes Obama’s two CIA directors (John Brennan and Leon Panetta), Obama’s director of national intelligence (James Clapper), Panetta’s former chief of staff at the CIA and current MSNBC star Jeremy Bash, and a bevy of Bush-era CIA and military officials who have rehabilitated their reputations among liberals in the Trump era (led by Bush’s CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden).

It is not difficult to understand why these Democratic national security officials — despite effectively rebranding themselves as #Resistance icons — are so supportive of Trump’s choice of a torturer to lead the CIA. Part of it is ideological and group loyalty: unlike Trump, Haspel is one them, a member in good standing of the intelligence and military world in which they have spent so much of their lives. Part of what motivates their support is standard tribalistic rank-closing: Yes, she is a torturer, but she’s one of our torturers.

Part of the motive is undoubtedly financial. Many of Haspel’s most vocal supporters from the intelligence community make great profit from doing business with the CIA. Few things would be better for business than earning the gratitude of the agency by publicly agitating for their prized nominee and using their credentials as Good Democrats to creating space for, and applying pressure to, Democratic senators to support her.

Jeremy Bash, for instance, is a founder and managing director of Beacon Global Strategies LLC, a private consulting firm led by Obama’s former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell (who, needless to say, also supports Haspel). Beacon is filled with ex-CIA and intelligence officials from both parties — including Panetta and Bush Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend.

Many of the Beacon executives are the same national security officials who last year worked with Bill Kristol and Mario Rubio’s neocon foreign policy guru, Jamie Fly, to create the Alliance for Securing Democracy and its Hamilton 68 dashboard to advocate for a new, more aggressive foreign policy (among those in both groups are Morell, Fly, Julianne Smith, and Adm. James Stavridis). It’s the living, breathing personification of the Revolving Door sleaze that everyone who doesn’t swim in it despises:

Beacon describes itself as “a strategic advisory firm specializing in International Policy, Defense, Cyber, Intelligence, and Homeland Security” and — to clients — touts its “deep experience informed by their years of service in the White House, State Department, Defense Department, CIA, Justice Department, on Capitol Hill.” In other words, it leverages its connections to the intelligence and military agencies for which they worked to generate profits from corporate clients who do business with those agencies or whose business otherwise depends on their good will.

If your income and profit depended on maintaining close relations with the government agencies which you once helped manage — as is true of so many of D.C.’s Revolving Door beneficiaries — wouldn’t you also leverage your public credentials to bolster whatever agenda they were supporting at any moment? For so long, Washington’s national security policy has been shaped by profit motives, fueled by legalized Revolving Door corruption, dressed up as counterterrorism and national security imperatives.

This is one of the problems with having TV and cable networks fill their rosters with former military and intelligence officials: They are ideologically and, so often, financially motivated to support those agencies’ worldview and agenda under the guise of “news” — in other words, to spout state propaganda. Of course they are going to use their Democratic Party credentials to support the CIA’s campaign elevate this CIA torturer: They have every ideological and business incentive to do so.

The primary argument being mounted on Haspel’s behalf is not that it was wise or just to torture detainees (the only one who seems to be making that argument is the president who nominated her and Dick Cheney’s daughter, now a pro-torture congresswoman occupying her dad’s old seat). Instead, the defense is the one proffered by the defendants — and rejected by the tribunal — at Nuremberg: Haspel was just following orders.

As my colleague Jon Schwarz noted when Haspel was unveiled, some Democratic national security officials are unironically using the exact phrase invoked by the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg to justify, or at least mitigate, Haspel’s conduct:

Samantha Winograd, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council and now is an analyst for CNN, likewise used Nuremberg defense language in an appearance on the network. Haspel, she said, “was implementing the lawful orders of the president. . . . You could argue she should have quit because the program was so abhorrent. But she was following orders.”

There is some factual accuracy to this claim: Haspel was not some rogue torturer. It is absolutely true that she was implementing CIA policy as decreed by George Bush, Dick Cheney and the Justice Department. Like most CIA officials involved in torture, not only was Haspel protected from punishment for that, but she was repeatedly promoted. That’s because torturing helpless detainees is regarded by the CIA as a noble and patriotic act.

That’s why it was so predictably disastrous when Barack Obama elevated to the highest national security positions CIA officials such as John Brennan who had supported and advocated for major parts of the CIA’s torture and rendition program, and why it was even worse when Obama devoted himself to shielding all torturers from all forms of criminal and even civil penalty for their war crimes (even in the face of a treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan, requiring all signatory states to prosecute, not immunize, their torturers no matter their excuse for using it).

Indeed, as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski pointed out today, a central prong of the GOP’s pro-Haspel messaging is “all the support Brennan got for CIA director from Democrats opposing her.” And that is, as he says, a “fair point”: after all, how can Democratic Senators posture now as vehement opponents of empowering torturers when they cheered Obama for naming the torture-and-rendition advocate Brennan as CIA Director, voted for his confirmation, and have now turned Brennan into a beloved #Resistance hero whose every Twitter utterance instantly goes viral?

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/993854861337878528

While the primary guilt for torture lies with those who did it (namely, top officials of the Bush White House and the CIA which obeyed their criminal orders), Obama’s sustained 8-year campaign to rehabilitate, protect and even empower torturers converted torture from what it should be – a criminal taboo that automatically leads to prosecution – into just another partisan political dispute. As a result, those who advocate it or even did it not only remain in decent company but even get Washington Post columns, MSNBC contracts, and hugs from beloved liberal TV icons.

The outcome of that climate is that one of the people who oversaw some of the worst torture the U.S. has inflicted is about to be elevated to lead the world’s most powerful intelligence agency.

The word “normalize” has become a favorite media cliché in the Trump era, but it applies with full force here: Gina Haspel as CIA Director is what happens when you normalize torturers by barring their prosecution and awarding them with high-level positions in media, politics, and the intelligence community. Torture becomes just another good faith political disagreement, something that at worst “taints” someone’s record – to use the remarkable  minimizing word chosen by the Washington Post’s long-time CIA defender David Ignatius – but should be weighed against their good points:

This is American Exceptionalism in its purest, and ugliest, expression: war criminals which lead African nations or enemies of the U.S. are sent to the Hague to be prosecuted, while American war criminals are rewarded, empowered, and praised. When an American tortures, it’s not a crime but a mere “taint,” and certainly not one that should result in denial of promotions let alone handcuffs and a prison cell.

During the last Israeli election, when pundits thought Benjamin Netanyahu may lose, I recall many Palestinian activists hoping that Netanyahu would win, because it’s clarifying of what Israel is to have Netanyahu as its leader rather than some prettier, more palatable figure who would support the same policies of occupation, aggression, and illegal settlement.

One could certainly look at Gina Haspel that way: she’s the Director the CIA deserves, an accurate reflection of what this agency really is. Having someone who everyone knows is a torturer at the helm of this agency will make it that much harder to sustain the U.S. media propaganda script – led by CIA spokespeople such as NBC’s Ken Dilanian and Ignatius – about the good and noble work this agency does. On some level, it’s healthy for the CIA to finally wear its true identity on its sleeve.

But it’s also clarifying about the charade of Trump and the #Resistance, about the supposed inability of the parties to agree on anything, of the refusal of people from different ideologies to unite. That Trump chose someone with one of the most gruesome torture histories to lead the CIA is certainly revealing about who he is. And if the Democrats cannot unite to stop that, that will be further evidence of what they are. What kind of #Resistance refuses to stop an actual torturer chosen by Donald Trump from being promoted to head the most powerful spy agency in the world?

The post Will Democrats Unite to Block Trump’s Torturer, Gina Haspel, as CIA Chief? If Not, What Do They #Resist? appeared first on The Intercept.

The contours of the campaign, in which spies posed as representatives of fictional firms and requested meetings to discuss financial opportunities, appeared to closely match those of a similar effort carried out by operatives of an Israeli firm this year to smear critics of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the far-right populist who is an ally of both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

The private intelligence firm involved in the anti-Obama effort was identified as Black Cube by New Yorker contributing writer Ronan Farrow, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the operation. Farrow previously revealed the firm’s role in spying on women who had accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Monday that an unnamed source close to Black Cube admitted the firm did spy on the Obama aides, but denied that the operation was related to the Iran deal.

According to Farrow, the documents outlined Black Cube’s assignment: to hunt for damaging information on former officials involved in negotiating the deal with Iran, including Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, and Colin Kahl, former national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.

“Black Cube agents were instructed to try to find damaging information about them,” Farrow wrote, “including unsubstantiated claims that Rhodes and Kahl had worked closely with Iran lobbyists and were personally enriched through their policy work on Iran (they denied those claims); rumors that Rhodes was one of the Obama staffers responsible for ‘unmasking’ Trump transition officials who were named in intelligence documents (Rhodes denied the claim); and an allegation that one of the individuals targeted by the campaign had an affair.”

While The Observer reported on Saturday that the private spies, including former Mossad agents, had been hired by aides to Trump, Farrow said that an unnamed source familiar with the operation told him on Sunday that Black Cube had been retained by “a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran.”

“Black Cube has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran Nuclear deal,” the firm said in a statement. “Luckily,” it added in an aside, “the Mossad and the CIA are capable to deal with the Iran Nuclear Deal.”

Unless Farrow’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on Black Cube’s work for Weinstein is incorrect, however, the firm’s denial that it spied on the former Obama aides rings hollow. That’s because, as the national security reporter Laura Rozen first reported, the same front company, Reuben Capital Partners, a fictional London-based wealth-management firm, was used as a cover by both an operative who spied on one of Weinstein’s accusers and an operative who tried to set up a meeting with Rebecca Vanasek Kahl, who is married to the former Biden adviser.

The female spy who befriended actress Rose McGowan claimed to be Diana Filip, a Reuben Capital Partners employee looking for ways to empower women. She was later identified as Stella Penn Pechanac, a former Israeli Air Force officer and actress whose non-Jewish family was rescued from Sarajevo in 1994 by Israel because her Muslim grandparents had saved Jews during the Nazi occupation of Bosnia in the 1940s. The female operative who contacted Kahl’s wife, seeking a meeting with her, and promising a donation to her children’s school, posed as Adriana Gavrilo, a “Corporate Social Responsibility Associate” at the nonexistent Reuben Capital Partners.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Gavrilo — whose pseudonym evokes Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, sparking the First World War — appears to be older than Pechanac, but is also fluent in Serbian.

A screenshot from LinkedIn.

Farrow’s report notes that an intelligence operative using another name — whose now-deleted LinkedIn profile included a photo of a thin blonde woman who looks like Gavrilo — also sought a meeting with Ann Norris, a former State Department official who is married to Ben Rhodes, to discuss hiring her as a consultant on a film. Like Rebecca Kahl, Norris suspected that the approach might be from intelligence agents and did not agree to meet.

This is not behavior that should be acceptable in a democracy. It is thuggish, mean-spirited, and casts a chilling and threatening cloud over public service that risks extending far beyond me and @ColinKahl https://t.co/tQY1wOO7Yy

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) May 6, 2018

The identity of the client who paid the former spies to conduct the failed smear campaign remains a mystery. But looking for a way to destroy the international arms control agreement the Obama administration and five other countries struck with Iran is a key foreign policy aim of two world leaders: Trump and Netanyahu.

Last month, Black Cube vehemently denied that it was the Israeli private intelligence firm Hungarian intelligence sources blamed for an elaborate smear campaign targeting Hungarian rights activists and groups that receive funding from George Soros. However, there was little doubt that at least some of the operatives who carried out that attack on critics of Hungary’s prime minister were Israelis, since both of the men whose voices were recorded spoke English with Israeli accents.

Between December and March, as The Intercept previously reported on that effort, at least 10 people who either run Hungarian nongovernmental organizations or have worked with or been supported by Soros were approached by intelligence operatives posing as representatives of nonexistent businesses who requested meetings. Those who agreed to meet were then secretly recorded — in Vienna, Amsterdam, and New York — by intelligence operatives using fake names who probed their subjects for dirt on Soros or suggested unethical or illegal behavior.

As part of the operation, the operatives created fake websites for the companies they said they represented, all of which were taken down after the meetings. Heavily edited portions of those mostly uneventful conversations were then provided to far-right Israeli and Hungarian newspapers, which falsely presented them in the run-up to last month’s election, as incriminating evidence that the rights activists were plotting against Hungary.

Soros, as a supporter of Israeli and Palestinian rights groups, has also become a hate figure to ultranationalist Israelis — including Netanyahu’s son — who have recently bonded with ultranationalist Europeans around a shared hatred of Muslims.

Netanyahu, who has similarly tried to blunt criticism from rights groups supported by Soros, describing the philanthropist as “hostile to Israel,” has forged a close bond with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. During a visit to Budapest last year, the Israeli prime minister was overheard urging the Hungarian leader to help him undermine a provision of a European Union trade agreement that imposes an obligation on Israel to respect the rights of the millions of Palestinians it rules in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Although the effort to demonize Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish financier whose philanthropy supports liberal causes, was accompanied by a government-funded advertising campaign that seemed to draw on racist tropes from the 1930s, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, told The Intercept last month that the attacks on Soros, “if he’s a Jew,” could not possibly be anti-Semitic, since they were echoed by Netanyahu.

The target of one part of the Hungarian smear campaign, András Siewert, director of Hungary’s Migration Aid, was so suspicious of the approach from a man with an Israeli accent who called himself Grigori Alexsandrov, that he secretly recorded and photographed their meeting, and later posted the audio and photos on YouTube. Siewert’s recording shows that the operative had tried to aggressively push him in the direction of agreeing that his organization should be involved in politics, which he resisted.

That episode appears to mirror a conversation between an intelligence operative who posed as journalist to interview Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council and an expert on the Iran deal negotiations. Writing on Twitter, Parsi recalled that “things took a strange turn” at one stage in the interview, “as this pretend journalist tried to goad me into agreeing that the Obama administration had pursued the nuclear deal for economic and financial reasons.” According to a transcript of the call, The Guardian reported on Monday, the operative probed Parsi “for any ways Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl… might have benefited from the 2015 agreement.”

In a series of tweets, Kahl suggested that the strange focus on him and Rhodes, as opposed to other, more senior figures involved in the Iran negotiations, might point to another Hungarian connection. Pointing to remarks made by the Hungarian-American former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka to Fox News in May, 2017, Kahl noted that “around the same time the Israeli firm was hired, senior White House aides began complaining to Fox News about a ‘Ben Rhodes-Colin Kahl nexus’ that was supposedly organizing opposition to the administration.”

Dr. Gorka criticizes media over White House coverage: "It's no longer fake news. It's now dishonest news." (via #Hannity) pic.twitter.com/K1mpXB6iJK

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) May 17, 2017

“About a month after the Israeli firm was allegedly hired,” Kahl added, “anonymous White House officials reached out to the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing tabloid, to smear Ben and me with baseless and false accusations.”

“As the summer wore on, senior White House aides pushed a narrative that Ben and I were solely responsible for turmoil across the Middle East,” Kahl noted, pointing to a July, 2017 CNN interview in which Gorka said: “policies that were born in the Beltway by people who have never worn a uniform, the people that were in the White House like Ben Rhodes, Colin Kahl, they helped to create the firestorm that is the Middle East, that is ISIS, today.”

https://twitter.com/politicalshort/status/886641298085511168

At the time, Kahl responded on Twitter with sarcasm and a jab at Gorka’s inability to gain a security clearance.

https://twitter.com/ColinKahl/status/885595943818723328

Late Sunday, Kahl also noted that before Gorka was forced out of the White House, he was reportedly tasked by Trump with helping to look for ways to justify withdrawing from the Iran deal.

“Some senior aides to the President were obsessed with Ben and me, and were seeking to smear us, around the same time the Israeli firm was tasked by someone to dig up dirt on us and our families,” Kahl concluded. “Did these same Trump aides—or outside people they contacted—have any connections to Black Cube? It’s unclear. Maybe it is all a coincidence. But it’s a creepy one… and one worth further investigation.”

Gorka does seem to have a strange obsession with trying, unsuccessfully, to bait Rhodes into responding to his insults on Twitter — which continued unabated on Monday following the revelation that he and Kahl had been targeted by foreign intelligence agents.

Update: May 7, 2018, 6:00 p.m. EDT
This article was updated to note Colin Kahl’s observation that the former White House aide Sebastian Gorka had publicly claimed there was “a Ben Rhodes-Colin Kahl nexus” supposedly working to undermine the Trump administration around the time that Israeli operatives were tasked with digging up dirt on the two Obama administration officials.

Top photo: Former President Barack Obama confers with Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, in the Oval Office on Sept. 10, 2014.

The post In Plots to Smear Obama Aides and George Soros, Israeli Spies for Hire Attack Netanyahu’s Enemies appeared first on The Intercept.

Most people, at least in the media, seemed quick to accept Reid’s apology — and they were right to do so. People have the right to change their beliefs as they and the society around them grow, learn, and evolve. That process should be encouraged, not stigmatized. Politics, at its core, should be about persuading people to repudiate misguided and destructive beliefs and adopt ones that are more reasoned, humane, and just. And when that happens, it should be celebrated, not scorned.

In 2012, the Democratic Party officially changed its position on LGBT equality when Barack Obama “evolved” and announced his support for gay marriage, which he had previously opposed. There’s no reason to doubt that Reid (who once worked as a press aide for the Obama campaign) changed her views on LGBT people to align with the new party dogma.

Candidly acknowledging the erroneous nature of one’s previously held views is a virtue, not a character flaw. As someone who has changed many of my own views about a wide range of both political and nonpolitical questions — growth that I hope and expect will continue for as long as I live — I regard it as vital that everyone have the space to reconsider old beliefs, and not have them held against one in perpetuity once they are renounced.

All humans err, and a critical part of life — one of the parts that makes it most valuable — is learning and changing. The very first line of my first book back in 2006 was this observation from Abraham Lincoln: “I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.” That was the framework through which I, and many others, viewed Reid’s December apology.

But the last 24 hours have changed the Joy Reid situation considerably. Last week, the same left-wing Twitter user (Jamie Maz) who first unearthed Reid’s anti-gay tweets about Crist unearthed far more toxic, bigoted, and vicious anti-gay articles that appeared to be from Reid’s old blog.

Reid has removed her blog from the internet, so Maz found the articles using the “Wayback Machine,” the internet digital archive that stores old online content even after it’s been removed or deleted by the publisher. Last night, the news outlet that reports on TV news media, Mediaite, published an extensive story on these newly found articles that appear under Reid’s byline.

But unlike the posts for which Reid apologized in December — which she said were intended to mock the hypocrisy of GOP officials who are simultaneously closeted gays, but also anti-gay in their politics — these newly discovered articles have nothing to do with GOP hypocrisy. They are just hateful, bigoted, and homophobic in their own right.

Some of the lowlights, as Mediaite itemized, include:

• “defend[ing] former NBA star Tim Hardaway’s aggressively anti-gay comments by writing that while such comments are stupid for a public figure to make: ‘most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing’”;
• saying she “couldn’t go see [Brokeback Mountain] either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex. Does that make me homophobic? Probably”;
• arguing that “intrinsic” to being straight is finding gay sex acts “gross”;
• “defending Marine General Peter Pace after he condemned ‘homosexual acts’ as ‘immoral’ by suggesting his views are actually normal”;
• opposing Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court by implying she is a closeted lesbian and comparing her “lesbian haircut” to those worn by the presidents of NOW and GLAAD;
• promoting the ugliest and most destructive stereotype of gay men as pedophile predators by suggesting that anti-gay attitudes are based in “concerns that adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them ‘into the lifestyle’ in a way that many people consider to be immoral” and that “gay rights groups seek to organize very young, impressionable teens who may have an inclination that they are gay.”

There are many other similarly horrific and bigoted passages that appear under Reid’s byline on her blog — far beyond the ones she previously acknowledged and apologized for.

If, in response to these new even-uglier posts, Reid had done what she did in December — acknowledged they were hers, owned her mistakes, apologized for the hurt she caused, and explained that she no longer holds these views — the reaction would have almost certainly been the same. Though many would likely be a bit bothered by just how deeply bigoted these writings were, few would hold them against her now. I know I would have reacted the same: If someone repudiates past beliefs and changes their views, they should be judged by their current viewpoints, not ones they held a decade ago.

But, this time, acknowledging and apologizing for these viciously bigoted post isn’t what Reid did. She did the opposite: She denied that she ever wrote them — or, at least, she denied writing some of them.

How, then, did they end up on her blog under her name? According to Reid, she was the victim of “hackers”: somehow, nefarious disinformation agents managed to hack not her blog (which is now deleted), but rather the Wayback Machine and its digital archive. They penetrated the Wayback Machine and then, according to Reid, added some anti-gay content.

Notably, Reid did not deny that all of the newly discovered hate-mongering was hers. But, in a statement to Mediaite, she suggested that at least some of these horrible articles — which ones she did not specify — were added by unknown “external” hackers:

In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.

I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.

Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries. I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.

Is it technically possible that hackers altered the digital archives of the Wayback Machine? Probably. After all, pretty much anything is possible.

But computer experts consulted by The Intercept said they were personally unaware of previous instances of the Wayback Machine being hacked and altered (which is not proof that it never happened). They also said that the work required to do this would be quite extensive and sophisticated. Cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr told The Intercept:

Regarding the Wayback Machine, I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that happening but it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t happen, I guess. Was it the very last post that she published? Because if it wasn’t (and depending upon how her blog was set up), then there may have been more than one copy that would need to be hacked. My old Blogspot blog is like that. … That’s an awful lot of work for a hacker to do, and for what end? To make a homophobic person appear MORE homophobic?

Moreover, some of Reid’s uglier, confirmed writings — not just about gay people, but also transgender people — square quite consistently with the newly discovered writing that she denies. Indeed, Reid has a far more extensive — and far more recent — record of homophobic and transphobic writing independent of the material she wrote about Charlie Crist, that postdates it and is material for which she never apologized.

Reid, for instance, was a vocal defender of the abuse doled out by the U.S. government to Chelsea Manning, which the U.N. concluded was “cruel, inhuman,” and bordering on torture; she mocked that abuse as nothing more than Manning whining that she wanted a “pillow.” Reid repeatedly suggested that Manning leaked not out of conscience or horror at what the U.S. military was doing in Iraq, but due to mental problems from being trans.

Mocking people on gender grounds, referring to men she suspects are gay as “Miss,” or implying they are trans for the sake of mockery, is a longtime Reid tactic. And she appears to have promoted, via her own tweets, at least some of the articles that she now denies:

None of this precludes her hacking claims from being true — maybe “external” actors decided to augment her confirmed bigoted, anti-LGBT writing with even more bigoted, anti-LGBT writing — but it is certainly probative on the question, given how consistent the passages she denies writing are with the ones she clearly did write.

Regardless of one’s views on Reid’s past anti-gay remarks, and regardless of what actually happened here, this is a serious news story — obviously so. And the biggest part of the story is not whether Reid wrote this anti-gay content. Again, if she did, and she acknowledged and apologized for it, that should not be held against her.

The biggest part of the story is the veracity of her remarkable claim — that she’s making not 10 years ago but now — that it was hackers who wrote the offensive material under her name.

Only one of two things can be true here, and they are both rather consequential: Either (a) hackers found a way to effectively alter the digital archives of the Wayback Machine in order to smear the name of a major TV news personality by attributing fabricated content to her, or (b) this major TV news personality is lying — not 10 years ago, but today — in order to falsely deny authorship of her own journalism.

Given the important issues at stake that liberal media outlets have vocally elevated as crucial — LGBT equality, combating bigotry, the security and reliability of online information, the dangers posed by hacking, journalistic integrity — one would think that they would be quite interested in this story and the critical questions it raises. But one would be quite wrong in assuming this.

The extraordinary claims from Reid that she was hacked by cunning and malicious actors has received substantial media attention — but only from conservatives sites such as Fox News and Hot Air (which asks some quite good questions):

So four months ago, Reid took ownership of the mocking remarks found on her old blog, even adding “there’s no excusing it.” Now she’s saying it wasn’t her at all and the FBI has been notified. Why didn’t she realize the problem before she apologized last year? Why didn’t she mention that she believed the site had been hacked until this new, unflattering material was revealed?

Mediaite notes that the person who sent them the fresh examples also sent them links to the internet archive showing where the screengrabs came from. However, the entire site is now gone from the archive so it’s no longer possible to see the archives of The Reid Report.

One way an archive can be removed is by the owner of the site adding a robots.txt file which tells the Internet Archive to exclude the site. Another way is to email the site and ask them to remove it. So it seems that, sometime after the story broke last December, Joy Reid had the archive taken down. Did she do that because she knew it had been hacked or because it was embarrassing? It seems she was embarrassed by it last year but now it’s someone else’s fault entirely.

A CNN reporter, Nathan McDermott, expressed subtle yet obvious skepticism: “Joy Reid uses the old, ‘I was hacked!’ defense after newly discovered homophobic posts from her blog were revealed.” (By “old,” perhaps McDermott was referencing the fact that Anthony Weiner, along with many others, originally claimed his accounts had been “hacked” when embarrassing material was revealed under his name.)

By very stark and notable contrast, liberal news outlets and liberal journalists have steadfastly ignored the story almost completely (the only exception I’ve seen is a tweet from the editor of one large liberal blog who suggested that Vladimir Putin was behind the hacking in order to ruin Reid’s reputation).

The reason liberal news sites are ignoring the story is as self-evident as it is troubling: Because Reid’s ideology is in accordance with theirs, and they therefore don’t care if she’s lying or telling the truth when denying authorship of these bigoted articles, nor do they care about the anti-LGBT bigotry itself. Those are concepts to be exploited opportunistically for partisan gain; they are devoid of any actual conviction. Their silence on this latest, incredibly strange episode involving one of their iconic media personalities demonstrates that rather compellingly.

Just as right-wing sites would be steadfastly ignoring this story if a Fox News host — in response to embarrassing articles found on their website — had claimed they were the work of bizarrely innovative and enterprising hackers, while liberal sites would be flooding the internet with detailed and indignant coverage of those claims, liberal sites are going to just pretend the Joy Reid story does not exist until it disappears. Reid knows this — she works every day with the people who run these liberal outlets and she knows exactly what their mentality is — and that’s why she feels no obligation even to address it beyond the statement she provided to Mediaite.

Reid is assuming that liberal media outlets will prioritize their ideological and partisan affinity for her over their proclaimed, profound concern for LGBT bigotry, hacking, and journalistic integrity. And on that question, at least, Reid is almost certainly right. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why trust in media institutions has collapsed to the point where people are as willing to believe what they read from fake sites as they are from established ones?

Update: April 24, 2018, 5:39 p.m.
The organization that maintains the Wayback Machine Internet Archive issued a statement this afternoon on its official blog, in response to this article and last night from Mediate’s. They write that in December, Reid’s lawyers contacted them and requested that they remove Reid’s blog from their archive on the ground that it had been tampered with. In response, they “let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation” and thus “declined to take down the archives.”

In other words, they could find no evidence that Reid’s claims were true that her blog was hacked, and thus refused to remove it. Thereafter, special code was placed on Reid’s blog, presumably by Reid, that resulted in the automatic deletion of her blog from the archives.

As CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski put it, the Internet Archive’s response “basically says there’s no proof Reid’s posts were the result of hacking or tampering, adding, ‘Reid’s claim regarding the point of manipulation is still unclear to us.'”

Correction: April 24, 2018
In discussing Reid’s multiple articles implying that former Gov. Crist was gay but in the closet, this article used a phrase inadvertently suggesting that he has subsequently come out as gay. He never has; Crist continues to maintain he is not gay. That phrase has been removed.

The post MSNBC’s Joy Reid Claims Her Website Was Hacked and Bigoted Anti-LGBT Content Added, a Bizarre Story Liberal Outlets Ignore appeared first on The Intercept.

The bipartisan war party is once again giddy with excitement as Trump prepares to become “presidential” again. This week on Intercepted: U.N. inspectors have not even arrived on the ground in Syria to investigate the latest reported use of chemical weapons, but Trump has already threatened Syria, Russia, and Iran that they will pay a “big price” and “nothing is off the table.” Historian Andrew Bacevich and Jeremy make the case against escalating U.S. military action in Syria, even if Assad’s forces were behind the attack. The acclaimed novelist Arundhati Roy talks about her new novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” and offers insights on Kashmir, Narendra Modi, Trump, and more. Roy also dismantles some widely held beliefs about Mahatma Gandhi’s politics. Actor and writer Wallace Shawn (“My Dinner with Andre,” “The Princess Bride”) talks about the U.S. assassination program, imperial wars, and collective responsibility. He and Jeremy also discuss “Evening at the Talk House,” Shawn’s new audio drama premiering next week on Intercepted. And Jimmy the taxi driver gets into Trump’s head in the aftermath of the raid on the office of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen. It’s a sabotage.

President Donald J. Trump: So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, good man, total witch-hunt, I’ve been saying it for a long time.

Jimmy the Cab Driver (MTV): The president of the United States of America, you’re talking about a very powerful man, you know, especially with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, you know?

DJT: And I have this witch-hunt.

J: But these guys, just like their Camp David, and where they go play golf.

DJT: Attack on our country in a true sense. Attack on what we all stand for.

J: Ah, yeah, well excuse me pal, because behind you guys in black, I like, you know —

DJT: They’re not looking at the other side; they’re not looking at the Hillary Clintons.

J: Sneaking this way: ninja warriors!

DJT: This is a pure and simple witch-hunt. Thank you very much.

[“Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

[Musical interlude.]

JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill, coming to you from the offices of The Intercept in New York City and this is Episode 52 of Intercepted.

Reporter: U.S. military action. Is it off the table?

DJT: Nothing’s off the table. Nothing’s off the table.

JS: The bipartisan war party is once again giddy with excitement. Just a year ago, they were celebrating as Donald Trump became “presidential” when he rained down $100 million worth of cruise missiles, 59 of them on a Syrian military installation. Now, they’re at it again, openly goading Trump. Daring him. Encouraging him to — well, they don’t say what exactly in Syria, but they want military action.

And the thing is, just last week Trump was reportedly talking about the U.S. getting out of Syria very soon. Just days later, it seems, that we may be on the brink of another significant escalation in the U.S. bombing of Syria. There may even be a substantial U.S. ground invasion at some point. This is a very serious moment. So what happened?

Well, on April 4th Russian television reported on comments that Vladimir Putin made during a recent visit to Turkey, where Putin said that Russia had intelligence suggesting that anti-Assad forces in Syria were planning to stage what he called provocations involving chemical weapons in Syria.

Vladimir Putin (translated): We have obtained undeniable evidence of planned provocation by the militants with the use of chemical agents.

JS: Soon after those statements by Vladimir Putin were broadcast, on April 6th, a senior Russian military official was quoted by the state news agency TASS, as saying that the Free Syrian Army was planning chemical attacks with the use of chlorine in areas under its control. That Russian official was quoted as saying “the militants plan to photograph and video the alleged effects of chemical weapons and show the clips to the public at large to blame government troops for civilian casualties, as well as to provide excuses for their own actions to disrupt the ceasefire.”

RT: Russia’s defense ministry says rebel groups have been armed with chemical weapons in Syria and are planning to stage false-flag attacks as a pretext for the U.S. to carry out airstrikes.

JS: On Saturday reports began emerging from the Damascus suburb of Douma that a chemical weapons attack had been unleashed on the civilian population. Horrifying images of children and women and men being rushed to the hospital or already dead were posted online, and they soon made their way to global television networks.

Holly Williams (CBS): Survivors struggling to breathe, especially children, and being hosed down as if to remove a substance from their skin. We cannot independently verify any of these videos or confirm whether a chemical attack took place. Survivors, though, reportedly smelled of chlorine, a chemical that can be deadly in enclosed spaces.

JS: Most of the news coverage focused on the civilians, and I believe that’s the right focus, but Douma was also a stronghold of an armed Islamist group that’s backed by Saudi Arabia and trying to overthrow Bashar al Assad. That group is known as Jaysh al Islam. In any case, the Trump Administration swiftly accused Bashar al Assad and the Syrian government of being responsible for the attack.

Newscaster: President Trump on Twitter called Syrian ruler Bashar al Assad an animal and called out Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran for backing him. Mr. Trump warned of a “big price to be paid.”

JS: Now, soon after this news broke Russia claimed that this attack was a realization of the warnings that its military general and Vladimir Putin had issued earlier. The Syrian government denied that it had carried out the chemical attack. Witnesses on the ground said it was Syrian government forces. Russia’s foreign ministry labeled the attack “fake news.” Said it was a false flag, intended to “justify possible military strikes from the outside.” Here’s Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov:

Sergey Lavrov (translated): I’m sure you saw this video where people allegedly targetted by the chemical weapons, while having water poured over them by people with no chemical protection themselves. This looks like the videos from a year ago, from the white helmets, who already proved to be untrustworthy.

JS: Now I take all of these Russian statements with, not a grain of salt, with like a massive mountain of salt. It’s the Russian government, and it lies, and it engages in constant propaganda. But that is Russia’s official position.

The United Nations Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said on Tuesday that it intends to send a team to Syria to investigate this latest incident, and it noted, in a press release, that this preparation “coincided with a request from the Syrian Arab Republic and the Russian Federation to investigate the allegations of chemical weapons use in Douma.” The U.N. said a team is preparing to deploy to Syria shortly.

Now it’s important to note here that in 2016, a U.N. investigative team concluded that Syrian government forces had used chlorine as a chemical weapon in three cases. The U.N. also concluded that the Islamic State fighters used sulfur mustard. In 2017, that same U.N. body placed the blame for the Khan Shaykhun attack on Assad’s forces.

Newscaster: More than 80 civilians died, many of them children. The report says evidence gathered from eyewitnesses, satellite imagery, and mobile phone footage indicate the attack was carried out by Syrian government aircraft.

JS: I don’t know who carried out this most recent attack in Douma. I’ve not seen clear forensic evidence or an independent assessment of what was used and by whom. That’s what the U.N. investigation is supposed to be about. Could this have been Assad’s forces? Yeah. That would be consistent with what the U.N. has concluded in some previous cases. Could Russia have been running a psychological operation when they predicted an attack and then it happens the very next day? Sure. Does Russia have a vested interest in Assad remaining in power? Absolutely.

At the same time, could Trump and his administration be wrong or straight-up lying about Assad’s forces conducting this attack? Sure. Could the CIA and other intel agencies feed Trump dubious intel posing as definitive conclusions? Absolutely. Does Trump desperately want the subject in Washington D.C. to change? Uh, no question.

Reporter: Do you have any response to Stormy Daniels!

JS: I have to admit here that it is very hard to think of a logical reason for Bashar al-Assad to conduct such a chemical attack right now. I’ve looked at various theories and none of them really make sense. At the same time, war is unpredictable and so are dictators and despots. None of this means that Assad’s forces didn’t do this — just that it would seem very bad strategy for Assad to have done this unless the point was to get Trump to escalate the bombing. And there are some theories about Russia wanting to pull the U.S. deeper into a Syria quagmire, but all of this gets into eighth-dimensional chess territory and straight-up hypothesizing or guessing. So, what I want to put forward here is this: Even if Assad or his forces have used chemical weapons, I’m totally against U.S. military action in Syria. This war has been a horrifying series of war crime, after a war crime, after a war crime: by Assad and his forces, by Russia, by the United States, and by some of the so-called rebel groups, including those funded and aided by the United States and its allies.

But here’s my bottom line: The U.S. has no business overthrowing governments. The use of humanitarian justifications for U.S. wars? It’s vapid, bankrupt bullshit. Don’t tell me you’re intervening to stop a genocide in Syria while simultaneously facilitating one in Yemen. Don’t tell me that after you lied about WMDs in Iraq, that now the mission is saving people from Saddam. I could go on for quite a while here. Just look at the U.S. record of destabilizing — well, the entire Middle East — and actually directly contributing to the horrors that now have gone on unabated for years and years in Syria.

Some people may believe that the U.S. should be the global cop, but if so, that’s one dirty cop — dirty to the core. That cop should not be trusted to rescue your cat from a tree. Here’s Trump’s U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley at the U.N. Security Council pushing for war based on this attack.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley: Who does this? Only a monster does this. Only a monster target civilians and then ensures that there are no ambulances to transfer the wounded, no hospitals to save their lives, no doctors or medicine to ease their pain.

JS: I think the use of chemical weapons is an unconscionable atrocity. They should be banned and those who facilitate their use should be held accountable under international law — and I don’t mean the selective U.S. interpretation of international law. At the same time, I wonder why these weapons have been singled out and seem to immediately justify all manner of bombing or military attack or maybe even an invasion. The U.S. uses banned munitions — cluster bombs. The U.S. has used white phosphorous, which is only legal because the United States has intervened to make it so. The U.S has bombed weddings and funerals, and it’s done double-tap drone strikes. It’s bombed hospitals and shot up ambulances and killed first responders. The point here is that many of the things that Nikki Haley cited have also been done in one form or another by the U.S. and its allies, and she says, “only a monster does this.”

President Barack Obama: There’s no doubt that some innocent people have been killed by drone strikes.

Amy Goodman: Five so-called double-tap strikes took place in mid-2012, one of which also struck a mosque.

Brian Williams: From a U.S. drone strike in Yemen that missed its target this week and struck what witnesses described as a wedding party.

Michelle Norris: The Pentagon is defending its use of white phosphorus in the battle for Fallujah last year. If the ignited particles land on a person, they can burn through the flesh, right through to the bone.

Amy Goodman: A suspected U.S. airstrike Saturday on an Afghan hospital in the city of Kunduz that killed 22 people — 12 staff members and 10 patients, including 3 children.

JS: And I’m just talking about the recent past here involving the U.S. — we could go back and talk about the Brits using chemical weapons and the U.S. using napalm or Agent Orange or the U.S. being the only nation to ever use a nuclear bomb. As of this moment, the U.S. and its allies continue to use internationally banned weapons, including cluster bombs. It’s as though there are some victims who become more worthy than others depending on the munition that’s used to kill them indiscriminately, or based on the identity of the particular force that’s using the weapon.

But chemical weapons seem to be this special trigger for war-mongering. Here’s Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal:

Senator Richard Blumenthal: The response has to have some military component so as to disable al Assad’s ability to use these chemical weapons because clearly, the commitments he’s made are unreliable.

JS: I agree that we should hold those who use chemical weapons accountable, and let’s have an independent investigation about this recent incident in Syria. But there is no case to be made for not doing the exact same thing with those who authorize the use of cluster munitions, which shred human beings into ground meat on a massive radius.

Right now, the world has international courts that can hold Bashar al Assad accountable. But those same courts have been completely defanged when it comes to holding U.S., Israeli, British, Saudi leaders, NATO leaders accountable. I believe that Assad is a war criminal, and if the U.S. did not do everything in its power to make sure that international law is never applied to the United States and its friends then it would be much easier to hold people like Assad accountable without it feeding into an unfortunately accurate narrative about the grotesque double standard and utter hypocrisy that’s on display every time the U.S. bombs or invades countries and is never brought to justice.

This drive to war by politicians is not actually about chemical weapons: It’s about American exceptionalism and hollow moral posturing. It’s about the military-industrial complex and its latest toys of war. It’s about the grand bipartisan addiction to the idea that the U.S. military is a hammer that always needs to find a nail. This focus on: Did Assad use chemical weapons or not? It’s an important one, but it should not be used to justify even more militarism particularly by the United States in the Middle East.

Historian Andrew Bacevich Makes the Case Against Escalating Military Action in Syria 

Joining me now to discuss all of this is the military and war historian Andrew Bacevich. He’s a professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University, and he’s the author of many important books, most recently “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.” Andrew, welcome to Intercepted.

Andrew Bacevich: Thank you.

JS: So, let’s just begin with the big picture. I want to set aside the discussion of Bashar al Assad and his human rights record and whether he’s a war criminal, et cetera, and just talk first about this notion that’s being pushed by both Democrats and now Trump and the Republicans, that the right response to a chemical weapons attack, if that is what happened here, is somehow the solution to the brutality in Syria. How do you see this current push to escalating military action in Syria?

AB: Well, it wasn’t the solution the last time we did this, about a year ago, when Trump ordered an attack on a Syrian airbase, and I don’t know why the outcome would be any different today. It seems to me that what we are witnessing, and I say we, those of us are trying to make sense of U.S. actions in the region, what we’re witnessing really amounts to expressions of frustration. We have managed to become bogged down in a war or series of wars that no longer have any plausible purpose, relative to U.S. interests, but nonetheless policymakers are at a loss for how to get out. So some atrocity like this occurs, and reflexively there is this inclination to lash out. But lashing out really becomes an excuse for not having a strategy.

JS: When you look back at the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, when the WMD lies fell apart, then Bush sort of transitioned and said: Well, we had to intervene because Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and it’s good that he’s gone.

President George W. Bush: The main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction — turns out he didn’t, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. But I also talked about the human suffering in Iraq, and I also talked the need to advance a freedom agenda. And so my question, my answer to your question, is that imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment and so much hatred that three — people came and killed 3,000 of our citizens.

JS: You look now and Saddam Hussein’s popularity has never been higher and that war was an utter disaster that, in part, contributed to what we’re seeing now in Syria. How is it that the political classes in this country, the elites, are able to continuously sell this idea that American intervention is actually aimed at bringing stability, when the history, particularly in that region, says that that’s a total lie, not backed up by historical fact?

AB: Well I think one important contributing factor is the inattention of the American people. I concur with your description — your, you know, very abbreviated description of what’s happened since 2003 — but I don’t see the American people being particularly aware of the extent of our failure. They’re not particularly aware of the costs that we have absorbed — costs whether we’re talking about American soldiers killed, injured, trillions of dollars expended. They’re not particularly aware of the costs imposed on supposed beneficiaries of our liberation, the hundreds of thousands of people killed, probably a couple million displaced.

So, given the lack of public attention, policymakers don’t feel any particular pressure to rethink the course that we embarked upon way back in 2002, 2003. I think it’s cheaper and easier for them — I say cheaper, politically — cheaper and easier for them simply to indulge this sort of petulant response to something like this latest ostensible chemical attack.

JS: I wanted to ask you about the conflicting statements of major world powers on this recent, what appears to be a chemical attack in this suburb of Damascus. A couple of weeks ago Russian top brass were warning that al Nusra and Free Syrian Army were plotting chemical attacks in Syria. A lot of people who are sort of onside for this with Russia are saying that this may be a false flag, or this may have been rebels, or this may be some sort of a fabricated scene by human rights groups that are allegedly tied to NATO. How do you see this? Because the one part of the set I sort of am sympathetic to is it really doesn’t make sense strategically for Assad to have done this, if he did — I’m not saying I know, he very well may have. But how do you see this discussion and debate where you have one camp that just immediately says: Aha, this was Assad! And then the other camp saying: Well, look, you know, Russia is denying this; they’re saying it’s a false flag. Who do we even trust in this stuff?

AB: What you’re describing is an argument that is conducted prior to us having ascertained the facts — to rush to judgment, to announce that, yes, we know for certain Assad did this. But it’s also a rush to judgment. To make the obvious case, I don’t know what the facts are. I think I would argue strongly that before the United States takes any further military action, it will likely deepen our involvement in the Syrian civil war that could potentially increase the likelihood of us coming into conflict with other powers that decision-makers ought to ensure that they have the facts. You know, to my way of thinking, let’s hold off, let’s try to find out what actually happened, let’s find out who the actual perpetrators are and then from that point make a decision.

JS: Why is it that the issue of chemical weapons seems to be this sort of line that now the public has been told if it’s crossed, there has to be an immediate swift response. I mean there are weapons systems that the U.S. uses that are not nuclear, chemical, or biological but kill tremendous numbers of people, including cluster munitions and TLAMs and others. What’s your view on sort of the way that that the issue of chemical weapons is discussed? I mean is it right to say, well this is in a totally different category and requires a much greater level of moral outrage than weapons systems used by the U.S., and the Saudis, and the Israelis?

AB: I don’t think so. I mean, the last thing I would want to do would be an apologist for the Assad regime — whoever did use chemical weapons, it was a despicable act. But I noted it was about a week ago there was an article about the number of people killed in Mosul during the campaign to “liberate Mosul.” It described the number of U.S. airstrikes, I think was 25,000 pieces of ordnance dumped on Mosul during the campaign there. And the upshot was that the number of civilians killed in Mosul, certainly not all killed by the United States, but many of them were, is vastly greater than anybody was willing to admit. And that’s a story that got almost zero attention.

So here we are, all excited and up in arms about 40 people being killed — and again, I do not wish to diminish for a second the depravity of that action — but one has to wonder why American killing of civilians on a much larger scale somehow doesn’t have the same sort of political resonance? And it ought to, and if it did, then it seems to me that the discussion over the use of force and its consequences would be much more grounded in genuine pragmatic considerations, and also would be grounded in moral considerations that are largely absent.

JS: You also have the fact that the United States forces in Fallujah and the Israelis do this also, use white phosphorous in some of their operations. That is akin to chemical weapons in terms of its impact on people. But to your broader point, we’re now saying, basically Trump’s being goaded into, you know, some scorched-earth response or just lobbing cruise missiles again. I mean, we don’t know which, but as we’re sort of looking at this we also have the Saudis just utterly exterminating Yemen right now with the continued support of the United States and the British and they’re treated in very different ways. It’s, you know, cable news today is just filled with Democrats and Republicans basically trying to push Trump to do maximum military force, and those same people are totally fine with Yemen being destroyed by the U.S. ally Saudi Arabia and it’s, you know, and the new best friend of the American media, Mohammad bin Salman.

AB: Well, you’re exactly right — we mock president Trump for his short attention span, but the whole country has a short attention span. I mean. I think it’s Gore Vidal who coined that great phrase “United States of Amnesia.” And that’s exactly right. We forget anything that we find inconvenient to forget. You remember when Trump in an interview with a reporter, Trump’s responses was: What do you think, we’re innocent?

DJT: We got a lot of killers. Got a lot of killers. Why? You think our country is so innocent? You think our country is so innocent?

Bill O’Reilly: I don’t know of any government leaders that are killers.

DJT: Well, take a look at what we’ve done, too.

AB: You know, the idiot speaking wisdom suddenly. So, there is this deep-seated tendency, I think perhaps it’s more prominent in the political class than in the larger public, but the larger public is not immune to it, this deep-seated inclination to think that we are somehow innocent. Sure, we make mistakes, but the mistakes we made ought not to be held against us, and therefore when we come to a moment like this new chemical weapons crisis, we approach it as if we are innocent and it is an enduring quality, I think, of the American mentality.

JS: Right, this is sort of the broader point that I’m getting at. The United States, in the 1980s, at the height of Saddam Hussein’s brutality, lifted Iraq off of the list of state sponsors of terrorism so that the United States could sell and transfer massive amounts of weaponry, including components for chemical weapons and attack helicopters to use those chemical weapons in Halabja to Saddam Hussein. And now we’re being asked to believe that the appropriate global police officer to handle such matters, when despots and dictators do this, is the United States.

It’s not that I don’t believe that Bashar al Assad is a war criminal. I absolutely believe he’s a war criminal. I, however, do not believe that the U.S. has the moral authority to sort of step in and say: Oh, we’re going to be the ones to stop all evil here, particularly given the U.S. track record in the region.

AB: You’re exactly right. I mean, it’s just very disturbing.

JS: What do you make of this question of Bashar al Assad, and obviously he has committed war crimes, how should, you know, people who believe in justice and are not taking the side of Assad and they don’t want U.S. intervention. Like, how should we understand what should be done about the situation in Syria, and particularly whether Bashar al Assad remains in power?

AB: Well my view is that the first-order question relates to the well being of the innocents, the real innocents, who are caught in the middle of this thing. So I say: All right, so what can we do? Well, we can go drop some bombs on Syrian forces. Will that alleviate the suffering of the Syrians who are caught in the middle of this mess? Seems to me if we actually cared about them, we would exert ourselves to find some way to remove as many Syrians as possible from the zone of war. Get them out of there! Bring them to the United States of America. This land of liberty. This vast country. Bring them here.

Could we bring them all here? No! What if we saved 200,000 lives, 500,000 lives? Wouldn’t protect everybody, but that would be a real action that would address real suffering. Dropping more bombs does not do that. Of course, as soon as I say that, you’re sitting there shaking your head, saying: What is this guy, off his nut? Because the American people will not tolerate bringing a quarter of a million or a half a million Syrians to our country. And the very fact that they won’t, I think, reveals how phony all of the moralizing that becomes part of this sort of a moment.

When Trump attacks Syria, as he probably will, he will do so without getting the permission of Congress, almost for sure. So we’ll launch 50 cruise missiles, 100 cruise missiles, who knows what the number it will be. It will cost some tens of millions of dollars. The Congress will immediately re-appropriate necessary money to build new missiles to replace those that are expended. We’ll pat ourselves on the back for having confronted evil, and we will have done nothing to benefit the Syrians who are actually suffering as a consequence of this civil war. I mean the entire thing is really kind of Orwellian.

JS: As we wrap up, I want to ask you about the bigger geopolitical picture here, particularly with regard to Russia. Part of what I’m seeing here is that, for the first year of his administration, Trump refused to ever say any anything negative about Putin. He did take some sort of mild actions in response to various things that the Russians did, but lately, and really in the last month, we’ve seen this dramatic escalation in the rhetoric against Russia coming out of the Trump White House, to the point where Trump even entertained the idea that Vladimir Putin would personally be punished for this alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.

DJT: He may, yeah, he may. And if he does, it’s going to be very tough. Very tough. Everybody is going to pay a price, he will. Everybody will.

JS: And I’m looking at this and thinking, OK, everyone was sort of trying to push Trump on Putin, saying he’s in Putin’s pocket. See? He won’t ever say anything about Russia. And now we have a president openly saying with no evidence that Putin may be held responsible for this, he’s going to pay a serious price. I’m concerned that what we’re seeing right now, and part of it is because pundits and the Democrats have been so fierce in going after Trump about his public stance on Russia, that we are entering a moment now where the commander-in-chief of the United States is openly belligerent against Russia. I can’t remember in my adult life this kind of a situation just in terms of the rhetoric between the American president and Russia. What’s your sense of that?

AB: Well, it’s, you know, it’s so hard to know what to make of president Trump. And I guess I mean it’s so hard to know what to make of the things that he says and the things that he tweets. The record of contradictions and inconsistencies that he has created, I think, is unprecedented.

I myself firmly believe that he does not have a worldview. He is incapable of really thinking in strategic terms. That he reacts impulsively. The impulse might be to launch some tweet at 5 o’clock in the morning. The impulse might be to meet with a handful of his advisers in a 180-degree reversal of what he said the previous day. And that’s part of his great danger, and so as we try to gauge the direction of U.S. policy, whether it’s with regard to Russia, or the war in the Middle East or relations with China, one of the things we have to puzzle out is who are the advisers that seem to shape his thinking?

I mean advisers could be the people on Fox News. Advisers could be people like Bolton, or Pompeo, or Mattis. In order to try to forecast the way things are headed, we need to have a more finely grained understanding of the advisers that count with Trump.

JS: I mean he’s a very malleable hunk of clay, in a lot of ways. I do think that there is a unique danger here, because of this phenomenon that you’re describing, and it’s like we watch this almost, it’s almost like a bipolar situation, where you have, on the one hand, Trump saying, “Oh, we’re going to be out of Syria soon, ISIS is almost defeated,” and then literally days later “Vladimir Putin may be held accountable personally for a chemical weapons attack in Syria.” I mean it’s, it’s like, who the hell is even running that ship?

And then you have the great mustache come in, John Bolton, who is just salivating to go to war with basically every non-white country on the planet. And we have a very incendiary situation. And these guys are also very serious Russia hawks. These guys cut their teeth as Cold Warriors, basically still believe in fighting the evil empire of the Soviet Union. I think that combination of Trump’s weakness and sort of tendency to flip-flop constantly, and then people like Bolton, Pompeo, Gina Haspel, and Mattis, I would include in that, whispering his ear, it’s pretty frightening.

AB: I agree. One of the things that makes this present Syria crisis frightening is I think you could argue this is the first genuine national security crisis that we’ve had since he’s been president. Now it could be that we’re going to have another perfunctory cruise-missile attack and the story will fade. It could be, and this is the real danger, that there will be a larger or more prolonged military effort, and one that could, not necessarily intentionally, in matter of fact, probably unintentionally, could end up bringing us into a conflict or near-conflict situation with Russia and/or Iran, with no doubt the government of Israel pushing from the sidelines. And that’s where our impetuous, ignorant president, surrounded by the hawks that you just described, that’s where you really can begin to see a nightmare scenario moving into the realm of plausibility.

JS: Yeah, and you know Trump was making a big deal and bragging about how he used the MOAB in Afghanistan, the mother of all bombs. I mean it it’s also a plausible scenario that Trump responds to this by hitting Damascus with this kind of massive munition. I mean, it could be that a tremendous number of people get killed in retaliation for this event before the U.N. has even been able to carry out an investigation.

AB: Yeah, and you are describing a scenario that then could easily slip out of control. And we end up with this ignorant president trying then to address a circumstance that he himself would not understand, and where his impulsiveness could really get us in big trouble. So this is a very dangerous moment.

JS: Well, Andrew Bacevich, I want to thank you very much for your analysis, and all of the books you’ve written, and the critical thinking, backed up by history, that you always bring to the table. Thanks so much for being with us.

AB: Thank you.

JS: Andrew Bacevich is a military and war historian. His latest book is “America’s War for the Greater Middle East.” He’s a frequent contributor to TomDispatch.

[Musical interlude.]

Novelist Arundhati Roy Offers Insights on Kashmir, Narendra Modi, Trump, and More

JS: About 20 years ago, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy published her debut novel “The God of Small Things.” It won the ultra-prestigious Man Booker Prize and it propelled her to international fame. But it wasn’t until last year that her second novel came out. That book is called, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Both of these novels are beautiful, powerful, epic stories.

So what did Arundhati Roy do for those 20 years in between, besides working on her latest novel? She used her very significant global platform to fight for justice in causes and with movements around the world. In India, she has been an advocate for the most vulnerable and dehumanized people. She spent extensive time in Kashmir. She has defended Muslims in India when they’ve been threatened, attacked or massacred. She’s published many, many nonfiction books and collections of her speeches, including such titles as “Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers,” “War Talk,” “Walking With Comrades,” and “The End of Imagination.”

Most recently, she and the actor John Cusack wrote a book on their meeting with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom they traveled to see in Moscow with Pentagon Papers-whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. That book is called “Things That Can and Cannot Be Said.” Arundhati Roy is going to be coming to the U.S. in May, and she’ll be speaking in a number of cities. I’m very proud to call her a friend, and she joins me now from New Delhi.

Arundhati, welcome to Intercepted.

Arundhati Roy: Thank you, Jeremy.

JS: And congratulations on your second novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”

AR: Oh, thank you again.

JS: So, I want to begin just by asking you about the dedication. You dedicated this novel to “The Unconsoled” and I’ve seen you in the past say that all of us, in some way, are the unconsoled. But talk about that dedication.

AR: The dedication is to those people who, like the people in the book, don’t fit into the categories that the ruling establishment, as well as, quite often, the radical resistance put people in – particularly the categories in India, because we are a nation of minority, a nation that is divided into this tiny little fretwork of caste, and ethnicity, and language, and each is pitted against. And yet, all serves a pretty ancient hierarchy.

In some ways, this is dedicated to everybody, but to everybody who, in some real ways, doesn’t fit into that very complex grid that we are asked to fit into, and then jump up and down in, and even be radical in. You know?

JS: In the reviews that I read of the book so many of them get wrong the identity of one of your central characters, Anjum. They identify Anjum as a transgender woman. But in fact Anjum, who was born Aftab, was born with both male and female gender organs and, you know, I think it would be really interesting if you could sort of explain that character, the reaction of her mother when she’s born and realizes that her child is not simply a male in gender.

AR: Her mother, Anjum’s mother, Jahanara Begum, when she discovers that about her baby, you know, she goes through a series of reactions. But fundamentally and eventually, the problem for her is that her baby is beyond words in her languages, because Urdu, which is the language that she speaks, genders everything: chairs, carpets, musical instruments, books, of course, men and women but everything has a gender except her baby. And so the question the book asks is: Is it possible to live outside of language?

Anjum, for example as a character, who people like to often ask me: Why did you choose to write about her and describe her as transgender. In fact, you know, she has more than just one identity. She’s also born as a Shia Muslim and lives through a time when this is a more dangerous identity in India than being a hijra, which is the Urdu word for people like here, you know?

And eventually as you read the book, you see, that she gets caught up in the 2002 massacre of Muslims that took place in Gujarat, and she gets caught up because she is a Shia, not because she’s a hijra, witnessing the massacre that took place around her and left alive because the murderous think that to kill a hijra would bring them bad luck.

There’s a Dalit character, whose name used to be Dayachand, who becomes a Muslim because he too witnesses carnage against his own father. So, he has the border of caste and religious conversion running through him.

JS: Well and he takes the name, Saddam Hussein.

AR: He takes the name Saddam Hussein because he has a video in his phone, which he admires, of Saddam Hussein’s execution. And he says, “Even if he was a bastard, I want to be a bastard like him.” You know?

It’s really, I mean it wasn’t something that I planned, but honestly, you know, the sense that we live in a grid here and these characters are all slightly off-grid, and through them, you shine the light on the grid, you know?

JS: Talk about how your real-world experience in Kashmir and the real-world experience of your friends and others in Kashmir made its way into this novel.

AR: I mean “The Ministry” is not a book where, you know, I had a manifesto or that I wanted to write about the battle in Kashmir or about caste or about what is happening in the forests of Bastar, but this is the air we breathe, you know? For me to avoid all this would be like taking some very complicated yoga position, you know, to try and write where you don’t look these things straight in the eye. And for me this has been my life for the last 20 years, you know? These are not just isolated issues that I’m trying to shed light on.

But to me, for Indian intellectuals, for Indian writers to have managed to write for so many years without mentioning caste in any real way, without talking about Kashmir, where, every summer, hundreds of people young people are being blinded by pellets, and all of this is so delicately airbrushed out. And we get our delicate fiction and our sophisticated analysis of identity without mentioning caste, without mentioning Kashmir — the upholding of this nation as the land of Gandhi and yoga and nonviolence, when in fact there has not been a single day since August 15, 1947, when India was declared independent that the Indian Army has not been deployed “within its own borders, against its own people.” Whether it’s Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Punjab, Goa, Bastar, it’s just a nation that is nailed together by military might, and we try to avoid thinking about it.

And when I write fiction, I’m not trying to write subjects; I’m not putting puppets on a page and trying to make them leave out some political manifesto of mine. You know? But I’m creating a universe in which I invite people to walk through.

JS: What is the significance of cemeteries in the book, and particularly this cemetery where Anjum builds the guesthouse.

AR: Anjum, I spoke about, you know, the fact that she survives the massacre in Gujarat which is, again, of course, a true event where in 2002 than a 1,500 Muslims were just massacred on the streets of the metropolises and towns and cities and villages of Gujarat, when Modi, the current prime minister was chief minister. So Anjum returns from Gujarat to Delhi devastated and unable to live the life she lived all these years. And she moves out of the Khwabgah, the place that she shared with this group of hijras, and she moves into a graveyard where she begins — she just lives there like this wild fearless, specter. She is just unmoored in grief. And, of course, a cemetery or a graveyard in India is usually a Muslim graveyard.

As you know, the Hindus, don’t bury their dead — they cremate their dead. So graveyards have also, in this extreme communalization, in which Muslims have been pushed to the bottom of the economic and social chain, you know? They are now denied housing. They’ve been pushed out of the political arena. They are, you know, lynched on the streets now openly and so on. And so graveyards have become a kind of ghetto, you know, where people congregate.

In the last elections in U.P., Modi and the current chief minister made big politics out of the fact that all the graveyards are consuming electricity and water — these Muslims, in other words. Of course people like Modi and so on, they belong to an organization called the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is the real political power today, not the BJP, and it’s an organization that was started in 1925, and its ideologues, [are] open admirers of Hitler and Mussolini, have openly said in the past that the Muslims of India are like the Jews of Germany. And, you know, in the last elections they proved to the world and to themselves and to the people of this country that you don’t need the Muslim vote. You know? So the Muslims are somehow disenfranchised right now. The Dalits have always been disenfranchised, but now the Dalit vote has been courted and there’s a lot of trouble around that because intrinsically they hate the Dalits too, you know, that is the Hindu caste system, you know for them? Whatever name you call them.

JS: But now there are millionaire Dalits.

AR: Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything.

JS: No, no, I know —

AR: If you actually look at the poorest of the poor, the landless, the jobless, they’re all Dalits. And, of course, that is how you neutralize someone. You create a tiny elite and then say, “Look, they’re millionaires.” And even the millionaires, by the way, will not be accepted in society. They will still be Dalits. But it’s a bit like saying, “Oh look, you have Michael Jordan and you have a few millionaire black actors and therefore there’s no racism in America.” You know?

JS: Arundhati, part of the reason that I brought up the fact that there are some millionaire Dalits now is sort of because we have a similar phenomenon. It’s not a direct analog but it’s a similar strand that you’re describing. I mean we had Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States and, you know, the narrative about that in sort of mainstream political circles is, “Aha! We’ve shattered this glass ceiling and now we have a black man as president.” And yet you look at the condition that many black people live in in this country, particularly with police violence and economic apartheid and it’s like: Did it really change anything? You know, you can siphon off certain elites and say this represents a new America, but in reality, the same exact issues are facing the very people from the black communities, Native American communities, undocumented immigrant communities, and on, and on.

AR: Yes, I mean the fact is that it applies to, you know, having a woman prime minister and so on as well. The same story about — does that change anything for women? There is something to be said when something like that happens, but does it change anything on the ground or has it changed anything on the ground is a big question? I would say that nothing at all has ever changed in India on the question of caste, because we are talking about people who used to be forced to walk backward and sweep away their footprints or hang pots around their necks so that the spit wouldn’t pollute the ground.

My heart broke the other day because you read about a young Dalit boy who was beaten to death because he dared to ride a horse in Gujarat. You know, and to me, he was Saddam Hussein on his horse, and his horse led the funeral procession. He was beaten to death by the upper castes, you know? Every day you have this kind of bludgeoning, lynching, beating, and when you have elections, all you hear about is which caste is going to work for whom and so and, and then when it comes to actually talking about the horrors that are visited upon people because of their caste, there’s a silence. It’s very, very complicated — I mean, I’ve written a little book, which was published by Haymarket, called “The Doctor and the Saint” where, it’s really about the debate between Dr. Ambedkar, the great Dalit leader at the time of the independence struggle and Gandhi.

Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar: Now if you read the two papers, you will see how Mr. Gandhi was deceiving the people. In the English paper, he posed himself as an opponent of the caste system and of untouchability. And that he was a Democrat. But if you read a Gujarati magazine, you will see him he was more an orthodox man, he has been supporting the caste system, varna ashrama dharma, and all the orthodox dogmas which have been keeping India down all through the ages.

AR: People completely have no idea about what Gandhi’s attitudes to caste and race were. You know? That falsification of that story is mind-blowing. Most people know the struggle of Indian independence through Richard Attenborough’s film, unfortunately, called “Gandhi.” That film is a piece of fiction, and through the struggle for independence Gandhi’s greatest antagonist was Dr. Ambedkar.

BRA: I met him first in 1929, through the intervention of a friend of mine, [a] common friend who asked Mr. Gandhi to see me. And so, Mr. Gandhi wrote to me saying that he would like to see me. So I went and saw him.

AR: He doesn’t even make an appearance in the film. He doesn’t even show up there. Gandhi insisted that he was the representative of all untouchables, as Dalits were call then, and the great confrontation between Gandhi and Ambedkar happened in 1930, at the Second Roundtable Conference in London, when Ambedkar’s arguing for a separate constituency temporarily for Dalits so that they could develop into a political community.

BRA: We want untouchability to be abolished. We also want that we must be given equal opportunity so that we may rise to the level of the other classes. But the other things, which are far more important, namely that they should have the same status in the country and they should have the opportunity to hold high offices so that not only their dignity will rise, but also they will get what I call strategic positions. From it they could, they could protect their own people; Mr. Gandhi was totally opposed. Totally opposed!

AR: They are scattered. Every village in India has a small settlement of Dalits outside the village. They can never be a full political constituency. Gandhi went on a hunger fast to the death until that was withdrawn — the idea of a separate electorate, you know? But even when you look at what happened in South Africa, all of us are taught that Gandhi went to South Africa, was thrown off a train and this was his first political education, and from then on he started fighting against segregation. This is complete crap.

The first battle Gandhi fought in South Africa was to have a separate entrance to the Durban post office because he believed that Indians, who he said were descendants of the Aryans, should not share the same entrance with blacks, who he consistently refer to as kafirs and savages. He fasted in prison to have separate prisons, separate food and the satyagraha that he started was not for racial equality, it was to allow Indian tradesmen into the Transvaal to trade.

And so the whole story has been completely distorted, which is not to say that Gandhi was not a brilliant politician, you know? I don’t want to take anything away from him. But I do want to say that the amount of deceit and intellectual dishonesty that has gone into the construction of this narrative is shameful.

JS: You know we, in the United States and on this show, we’ve talked a lot about how powerful people and pop culture have sanitized the legacies of people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks to the point where, you know, I think many people who have studied Martin Luther King’s life believe or agree that he would never be invited to his own Martin Luther King Day celebrations today because he was too radical.

Talking about your description of Gandhi, who benefited from the creation of that narrative around Gandhi?

AR: The Indian upper caste elite, obviously. Because in “The Doctor and the Saint,” what I call him is the saint of the status quo. It was time for the British to give way to this upper-caste elite. Even this whole preaching of nonviolence as the only revolutionary thing. What does it mean? I keep saying you know I travel to the forests of central India today. Ten years ago, today, now, all the time. You have tens of thousands of paramilitary forces unleashed in those forests, because MoUs have been signed with mining companies, 1,000 paramilitaries will go to a village, an indigenous peoples village, four days walk from the main road — surround it, burn it, rape the women, steal the cattle and go. And then in the television studios, when these people have reacted militantly, violently with the commandos and guerrilla forces, but in the studios, they’ll start calling them terrorists.

I said, you know, what should those people do, you tell me? Should they go on a hunger strike? They are already starving. Should they boycott foreign goods? They don’t have any goods. They don’t have an audience to do any sort of nonviolent satyagraha. You need a sympathetic audience. You need a superstar.

Honestly, Jeremy, if you go traveling to India through the poorest places of India, you will not find a picture of Mahatma Gandhi in any poor person’s house. You will find a picture Ambedkar. Gandhi will be in the government local collector’s house, or in the government office, or whatever. But you will not find it in a poor person’s house, you know?

JS: As I was preparing to talk to you, I was remembering, you and I met back in 2004 at this time, when the streets of, you were in New York, and the streets were sort of around the clock filled with protesters who had come from, really, around the world on the occasion of the Republican National Convention.

James O’Neill: My name is Inspector James O’Neill. You are obstructing pedestrian traffic. I’m ordering you to leave this sidewalk. If you do so voluntarily, no charges will be placed against you.

JS: And George Bush and Dick Cheney were running for re-election, and you and Amy Goodman and I went into the Republican National Convention, we got you a credential so that you could go past this massive security apparatus. And we stood on the floor of the Republican National Convention just a few feet away from Dick Cheney. And he spoke that night and gave this very belligerent war speech.

Vice President Dick Cheney: Just as surely as the Nazis during World War II, and the Soviets during the Cold War, the enemy we face today is bent on our destruction. As in other times, we are in a war we did not start and have no choice but to win. [Audience cheers and applauds.]

JS: And I remember you talking about being in sort of this stadium filled with killers, and people egging them on and cheering them on.

AR: I actually, you know, don’t know what to say, because it’s like being in a cult, a place where people are kind of chanting, which veered between chilling and corny, so I’m still confused about which one it was, but I’m sure it was actually chilling, cause to be in a place which is where the richest and most powerful people in the world meet, to plot the next war, the next massacre, the next bombing.

JS: Your reflection on where we are now, versus where we were at that moment, when you and Dick Cheney were in the same room.

AR: (Laughs.) Me and Dick Cheney. Obviously, on the face of fate, your president is somebody who is managing to confuse everybody in the establishment, including the Republicans themselves. You know? But ultimately, I still am waiting to see whether it is in fact an empire on the wane or not. Because there is a white nations agenda, isn’t there, in the world? I mean, Europe and America eventually will hold together, you know? And day-to-day, are the biggest merchants of death: We are doing the buying and they are doing the selling of all the weapons. And that is the fundamental strength of the economy now.

So there can’t be peace on earth when, just to keep these economies going, you need to be at war. Since 9/11, how many countries have been destroyed, and all of us keep talking about this fundamental Islam, but when you look at the countries that have been destroyed, none of them were really fundamentalist Islamic states, you know? Those ones are of course your allies.

Like a lot of people like to compare Trump to Modi. But to me Trump is like someone who has grown out of the toxic effluent of a system that went very wrong, you know? But I see that every elite American institution is against Trump — the media is against him, the military is suspicious of him, the economists are suspicious of him, the White House itself is suspicious of him, blundering around there. But nobody knows what to do because you don’t have any system in place to deal with a lunatic in the White House, so — you don’t know what to do.

But in the case of India, you know, Modi is very much the deep state. He is the product of planning from 1925 for this moment when — they’re almost there — when they can change the Indian Constitution, call it a Hindu nation. So you have a situation here which is the opposite: where the army, the corporates, the media the elite, everybody has been supporting him. Everything is just frozen. And continuously, this venom is being dripped into people’s brains about: India should be a Hindu country and Muslims should be ghettoized, Dalits should be disenfranchised in some way. There’s an attack on institutions the history books are being written by complete cretens.

So what’s going to happen to the next generation? They will be unable to think unless they find non-formal ways of going to school and college. You know?

JS: As we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about something that you said years ago that I actually think about often, and it deals with the, I think, moral challenge that we often find ourselves in, people who believe in justice, and that is that, you know, we don’t have an ability or even a moral authority to choose the form of resistance that rises up in response to the crimes of the imperial nations around the world, and it was during the Iraq war, and really as the Iraqi armed resistance started to really take a toll on the U.S. occupation, and you said the following: “You support the resistance but you may not support the vision that they’re fighting for, and I keep saying I’m doomed to fight on the side of people that have no space for me in their social imagination, and I would probably be the first person that was strung up if they won, but the point is that they’re the ones that are resisting on the ground and they have to be supported, because what is happening is unbelievable.”

I recently was thinking about this in the context of what is happening in Syria and Iraq and in Palestine —

AR: In Kashmir —

JS: — where the Israelis just committed another massacre, and in Kashmir and then historically the genocidal campaigns against the Kurds. Are there any forces of resistance that are worth your support right now, in any of these conflicts? I mean, I am against what the United States and Russia and all of these powerful nations are doing in Syria. At the same time, who is the resistance in Syria? And I don’t mean, Arundhati, explain the different factions.

AR: Well, honestly, Jeremy I don’t think that the way to resist this is for me or you to go to Syria and support some faction or the other. You know because the problem is at your home. The problem is to take it down there in the United States, or to take it down here in India. You know I, in many ways, am obviously deeply entrenched here, and deeply grounded here, and here certainly there are many, many, many people and many organizations and many ways in which the resistance that is being raised is wonderful, you know?

What my issues, let’s say when I think about something like Kashmir, is that it’s not my business to think necessarily about what kind of Kashmir is being fought for, but it’s certainly my business as somebody in whose name this violence is perpetrated to stand up and say it as it is: we need to do it in the places where things are being done, it doesn’t help for you to go to Syria. It helps for you to be where you are, and to prevent that from happening in whatever way you can. For me, I need to know the place where I stand and why I stand there.

JS: Hmm. Well, I think that’s a really great note to end on. Arundhati Roy, thank you so much for talking with me.

AR: You’re welcome, Jeremy.

JS: Arundhati Roy is the author of two novels. Her first, “The God of Small Things,” won the Man Booker Prize. Her new novel is called “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Both of them are beautiful, deep, powerful books that I highly recommend.

If you want to catch Arundhati Roy when she’s here in the U.S., you can find a list of her events by going to roamagency.com/roy. That’s roam, R-O-A-M, as in, roaming the planet: roamagency.com/roy.

[Musical interlude.]

Wallace Shawn on the U.S. Assassination Program, Imperial Wars, Collective Responsibility, and “Evening at the Talk House”

JS: As Donald Trump contemplates an escalation of U.S. military action in Syria, we should note that he has also been ramping up the number of drone strikes across the Middle East since he came to power. The first U.S. drone strike ever reported in southern Libya occurred just last month. It was Obama, the so-called antiwar candidate, the constitutional law scholar, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was calling for us all to get behind these precision drone strikes — his smarter way to wage war, better than boots on the ground and less loss of civilian life.

BO: It is not true that it is been this sort of willy-nilly, you know, let’s bomb a village. That is not how folks have operated. And what I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war.

JS: The reality, though, was that in some so-called targeted killing operations, as many as nine out of ten people killed were not the intended target, and they were, as a matter of policy, labeled EKIA, or enemies killed in action. It was basically a macabre mathematical formula that was used by the Obama White House widely to claim that no civilians, or only a limited number of civilians, were being killed. The idea was: Well if we don’t know who they are, let’s first label them an enemy that we killed, unless someone posthumously proves that they were a civilian or an innocent bystander. It’s pretty sick.

Who can be held accountable when drone strikes kill the “wrong person” or they hit innocent women and children, or weddings or funerals? Is it the president? Is it the CIA or the military entities that authorized the strike? Is it the soldier who pressed the button somewhere in a drone operations center? What about the role that ordinary people play in all of this? Aren’t we all complicit in this new, sanitized, robotic mass-killing program?

A new audio drama, “Evening at the Talk House” is going to be premiering next Wednesday here on Intercepted. It’s written by Wallace Shawn. And I don’t want to give away anything or spoil the plot, but let’s just say that it deals with this world of so-called targeted killing, and the moral responsibility that we all should hold.

The play is set in a fictional world that closely parallels our own, but it has some subtle and not-so-subtle differences.

[“Talk House” promo plays.]

JS: Wally Shawn has had a long career in film, television, and stage, both as a writer and as an actor. He’s known for his roles in “The Princess Bride.”

Wallace Shawn (as Vizzini): Inconceivable!

Mandy Patinkin (as Inigo Montoya): You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

JS: “My Dinner with Andre” —

WS (as Wally): I would never give my electric blanket, Andrew. I mean, because New York is cold in the winter. I mean, our apartment is cold!

JS: And Wally Shawn lent his voice to the anxious T-Rex in Toy Story.

WS (as Rex): Woody, look, I can see daylight! We’re going to be okay! Ha ha ha!

JS: Wally describes himself as a socialist. He’s an activist and he definitely is a prolific playwright and essayist. His latest book, “Night Thoughts,” talks about Trump, extremism, privilege, and capitalism. I really think that this new drama, “Evening at the Talk House” is going to resonate with a lot of people — particularly at this dark moment we find ourselves in.

It’s a play about a group of actors who spend an evening together after ten years apart. They reminisce about old times while the dark reality of their world is slowly revealed. It raises provocative questions about all of our responsibility, when facing an authoritarian government — even if it is a democracy. We’re really excited to be producing this radio drama with Wally Shawn. There are some really great actors in the play, including Wally: Matthew Broderick, Larry Pine, Jill Eikenberry, and Annapurna Sriram, from the show “Billions.” Make sure to look for it next Wednesday, April 18th, on the Intercepted feed.

I’m joined now by Wally Shawn. Wally, welcome to Intercepted.

WS: Great to be here.

JS: We are very, very excited to be sharing the radio drama of your recent play, which is called “Evening at The Talk House.” I think it would be really helpful for you to explain the world that you created with this play, and what people will need to understand before listening to it.

WS: It is a made-up world, if you want to look at it that way, a dream, but a dream that is dreamed by a guy who’s living in our world. And the ingredients for all of our dreams are in our own lives. It takes place in a club where people who work in theatre used to gather, ten years or twenty years in the past, and the club still exists, even though, in this world, theater is basically gone. But somebody has the idea to have a reunion of all the people or several of the people who worked on a particular play ten years earlier.

Matthew Broderick as Robert: When I asked Ted where he thought we should hold our great anniversary celebration, he replied:

John Epperson as Ted: “Why, the Talk House, of course!”

MB as Robert: The Talk House, my god, the Talk House, that almost legendary, wonderfully quiet and gentile club.

WS: And so it’s a play about a reunion, and during the ten years since that play opened, everybody has gone on to a different life. Some people have gone up in the world and become quite successful and powerful in the new regime that apparently is running the country, and other people have declined and are doing much worse than they were ten years before.

JS: What I think is sort of one of the most powerful aspects of this, is it could be any of us having a reunion, any of us getting together with old friends the way you do, and some of them you’ve kept in touch with and others you don’t know what’s been going on in their lives, and without giving away anything vital, you somehow have managed to capture several of the major issues facing our society today in this play, the me-too movement and the harassment of women by more powerful men that they work with or work alongside, targeted killing also, what was going through your mind as you started to write this play and contemplate the issues that are tackled in it?

WS: You know, we Americans are in a way innocent and sweet creatures, but we somehow have the capacity, without being very conscious of it, to become violent killers. I think of myself as a pretty innocent person. All I do is put on little plays, or I act in rather innocent TV shows, but, you know, when I pay my taxes those dollars go directly to the Saudis who are committing massacres in Yemen. I’m paying for it. And I’m benefiting from it in the sense that I live a pleasant life in a country that is defended, let’s say, by a very brutal machine.

So the play reflects this reality that we Americans don’t see violence, and we don’t even see the ugly side of ourselves. We just sort of pay for it.

JS: Some of the policies that you’re referring to there, and some of this kind of culture of being detached from what our tax dollars are used for, the politicians that we may have voted for, what they enable when they get to Washington, you take it to a degree that may seem to the listener to be quite absurd. But in our society, we have automated the act of killing each other around the world — albeit we’re maybe one step removed from it because we’re not actually firing the missiles from the drones or controlling the joystick over them. But in a way, we’re all just as attached to someone who does the actual killing themselves on a moral level.

WS: We’re the beneficiaries of these things. So, the play is about nice people, sort of likable people, but, you know, how likeable can they be as things enable you to see some of the other sides to them. And, of course, the personal lives of the people are reflective of their conformity and their fearfulness and their coldness, basically. And the people who are doing very well in this world, we get to see a little bit about their personal life, and that can be disturbing.

JS: I wanted you to talk about Matthew Broderick’s character, Robert, and, you know, really is the figure that introduces the play to the viewer, or, in this case, the listener. Maybe you could explain who Robert is and what he represents in this society.

WS: Well the play that they’re celebrating was not very well liked.

WS (as Dick): Robert’s plays always took place in a sort of imaginary medieval world with noble knights and fair ladies and all that sort of thing. And eventually, he wrote a play with the rather odd title “Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars.” He was sure it was the best play he had written, but it didn’t do well at all, and that was the last play that Robert wrote.

WS: He wrote the play and it sort of significant that he’s a writer, and what kind of a writer was he? He was celebrating heroic values, I suppose, in his youth.

MB (as Robert): And, sure, part of the pleasure I took from watching those figures was that their very manner, their bearing, so often reflected certain extremely noble, but, at the same time, perennially threatened ideals that I greatly admired then and still do: self-sacrifice, first of all, I suppose; courage, or heroism on a field of battle, if that was the venue; loyalty, the instantaneous repeated decision to choose suffering in preference to dishonor; the power and magnificence of the body when inspired into action.

WS: And heroic values are things that I myself sort of admire. I admire courage when people will risk their lives for what they believe in. But on the other hand, these heroic values are, if given a tiny twist, are fascistic: the love of force, violence, the essence of fascism and manliness, which is a terrifying idea, and he wrote plays celebrating those types of values — which, on the one hand, you could see as agreeable Robin Hood-type of values, or on the other hand you could see them as terrifying, Mussolini-type values.

Well, as he’s become more powerful, his own cowardice I suppose may have come to the fore. He doesn’t want to risk his own position, as, you know, we don’t — as we, if we rise up to a higher level, we have more to lose. People who rise up become addicted to their power and their comforts, so we see in the play, the guy doesn’t want to risk what he has —

JS: And then you have this mysterious character, played by yourself, who is Dick, and clearly everyone sort of is looking down on Dick, they sort of are implying that he’s an alcoholic, and a kind of flop, a guy who was a one-hit in his life. Who is Dick, the character that you both wrote and play?

WS: Well Dick was not invited, and Dick wasn’t in the play. Dick tried out for the play but was rejected. But he’s allowed to hang out in this club.

WS (as Dick): As fate would have it, I myself was rather often to be seen at the Talk House around that time, and indeed, I happened to be there on the very night that the 10th anniversary of Robert’s opening was going to be celebrated. I was having a few drinks there, during the late afternoon, and eventually, I fell asleep in a large armchair.

WS: And a lot of the play is about how a group coheres, and the principle of conformity. I mean it’s a play really about a group more than it is a play about individuals.

Michael Tucker as Bill: I just can’t stand that program of murdering. It gets bigger every year. I mean, I think it’s awful, and I don’t know why —

Larry Pine as Tom: Well, well, to some extent I think they got into all that because they found it attracted an awful lot of voters. I’m — I mean, that’s all very popular in the rural areas.

MT as Bill: Oh, I’m sure it is, but you can’t just snuff out this enormous number of lives because people in the rural areas find it, because they find it somehow —

Claudia Shear as Annette: Well, it isn’t really an enormous number of lies.

MT as Bill: What?

CS as Annette: Well, it isn’t an enormous number of lives.

MT as Bill: It isn’t?

WS: It’s a kind of sociological study, as well as a psychological one and Dick is kind of the outcast and there are very unmistakable signs that he is not popular with the powers that be.

JS: You know, I remember the night after I saw your play in New York, I was going home and I passed all of these storefronts of H&M, and the Gap, and Banana Republic and all of them as I was walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to go to the train, and thinking like, in this world with all these disposable clothes that we now have, where clothes are only intended to last for a year or so, and you keep changing them for new ones, and they’re all made in sweatshops around the world. And I sort of wonder: What would our lives be like if at the place where you’re looking through the rack at the shirts, trying to find your size, if there was just like a little video kiosk that showed footage of the children that make the garments on that, and it’s showing the conditions that they work in or the wages that they’re paid for it, or if we go to the gas station, if we’re shown footage of the various wars that are fought in the name of natural resources.

Do you think it would have an impact at all on our consumerism if we were brought face to face with the impact of our consumption? Because it’s a theme in this play, is like: OK, we all walk around as though we have nothing to do with our nation’s wars or other things. But we really do. And part of the point of this play that I think is so powerful is to strip that away and say, you know, how absurd is it really?

WS: Well this is Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities. Well, it’s a huge debate that people have — more optimistic or idealistic people say if people knew what was going on, they’d be outraged and it would stop. Doesn’t seem to be true to me. I mean certainly, the most obvious and almost overused example is Abu Ghraib photos coming out, and basically Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney and those people saying: Well, yes we do torture people. The period of outrage was brief and then it was replaced — incorporated — into the understanding that we had of, you know, what we Americans do.

I mean Obama, rather peculiarly, said: “That’s not who we are.” It apparently was who we were. And most Americans assimilated that, it seems.

And our country is very far-gone. It’s very decadent. It’s gone to a very extreme level, and Trump is an archetype of total selfishness — I mean he openly shows a contempt or complete lack of interest in the suffering of others. I mean, he openly says: We don’t want any Syrian refugees because I think that some of them might be terrorists. So we won’t even take in any of these people, who are living in agony! Who are desperate.

People did vote for someone who openly is not compassionate and — well, he personally, said he thought torture was a good thing and he would eagerly bring it back.

JS: And kill the families of people that they suspect of being terrorists, too.

WS: So, you know, I just think our society is pretty far-gone.

JS: Well, I think that all of these are issues that in one way or another are touched upon in “Evening at the Talk House.” I think it’s going to be really provocative, and I’m really looking forward to what all of our listeners and others think of this experiment you and I are embarking on.

WS: I can’t wait.

JS: Wally Shawn, thank you so much for talking with us.

WS: It was a pleasure.

JS: Wallace Shawn is the writer and star of the new radio drama “Evening at the Talk House.” It was produced by Intercepted.

If you’re a sustaining member of Intercepted, you’re going to be getting a private link today to listen to the play. You can also ask Wally questions in a live video Q&A that I’m doing with him this Thursday, April 12, at 7 PM EST. Info about that Q&A is going to be sent to our sustaining members as well.

If you are not yet a sustaining member, you can become one by going to theintercept.com/join. And, if you’re not in a position to contribute financially, have no fear: Next Wednesday we will be sharing “Evening at the Talk House” with all of our subscribers.

[Musical interlude.]

JS: And that does it for this week’s show. Next week, in the Intercepted feed, is going to be the radio drama in three parts, “Evening at the Talk House.” We will not have a regular Intercepted next week, but we will be back on Wednesday, April 25th.

Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. We’re distributed by Panoply. Our producer is Jack D’Isidoro, and our executive producer is Leital Molad. Laura Flynn is associate producer. Elise Swain is our assistant producer and graphic designer. Emily Kennedy does our transcripts. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

Until next week, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Senator Ted Cruz: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, welcome, thank you for being here. Mr. Zuckerberg, does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?

Mason Ramsey: (Singing) Lord, I don’t know what I’ll do —

Senator Ted Cruz: Let me ask the question again: Does Facebook consider itself to be a neutral public forum? And representatives of your company have given conflicting answers on this.

MR: — and sigh, oh Lord —

Senator Ted Cruz: It is just a simple question.

MR: — well Lord, I thought I would cry —

Senator Ted Cruz: Do you consider yourself a neutral public forum, or are you engaged in political speech, which is your right under the First Amendment?

MR: — daddy, such a beautiful dream. —

Senator Ted Cruz: Mr. Zuckerberg, I will say there are Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook —

MR: — Well I’m nobody’s sugar daddy and I’m lonesome —

Senator Ted Cruz: — Thank you.

Senator John Thune: Thank you Senator Cruz. You want to break now? Or you want to keep going?

The post Intercepted Podcast: A Nation Addicted to War appeared first on The Intercept.

"What would you do if you could go back in time?"

Everybody else: "Stop Hitler"
Piers Morgan: "PR for Hitler" pic.twitter.com/N2LANqI3Mz

— James Felton (@JimMFelton) January 26, 2018

That, at least, is how Morgan described Trump’s remarks, as regret for having retweeted anti-Muslim videos posted on Twitter by the deputy leader of a fringe political party for British white supremacists. Video of the exchange, however, reveals that something quite different happened:

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: In his first international interview since becoming US president, @realDonaldTrump says sorry for retweeting anti-Muslim videos. @piersmorgan https://t.co/kFCEKnYxyI

The full interview will air on Sunday 28 January at 10pm on @ITV and available on the @itvhub. pic.twitter.com/Am5nH1jvPw

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) January 26, 2018

Far from expressing regret, or taking any responsibility for his role in helping to promote the hateful ideology of the racist group Britain First, Trump offered a variety of excuses. The first of these was that he had good reason to share the videos, since, he said, they depicted “radical Islamic terror,” and he wanted to do his part to draw attention to such behavior. Second, Trump said, the fact that he had taken part in the propaganda campaign of a group of British racists was hardly worth mentioning, since it “was not a big story” in the United States at the time.

Most importantly, however, Trump argued that he could not be held responsible for promoting the hate-filled views of the British extremists he had boosted on Twitter because he had no way of knowing that the obviously racist tweets he had chosen to share had been posted by racists.

After Morgan told Trump that he wanted the British people to get to know “the real you” and suggested that an apology “would go a long way,” the president stammered out something less than contrition. “If you’re telling me,” Trump said, “that’s a horror p –people, horrible racist people, horror — I would certainly apologize, if you’d like me to do that.”

But instead of going on to actually offer an apology, Trump returned to excusing himself, adding, “I know nothing about them.”

Among those who noticed the blank space where the apology was supposed to be was Tracy Brabin, a member of the British Parliament from Batley and Spen, whose seat was previously held by Jo Cox, a pro-European MP assassinated in 2016 by a white supremacist who shouted “Britain First” as he stabbed and shot her.

Hello @POTUS . You've just said you'd apologise for sharing far right hatred on social media. As the MP for #batleyandspen, a community who's MP was murdered by someone holding similar views to those you endorsed, we'd like to hear that apology. Thank you.

— TracyBrabinWY (@TracyBrabin) January 26, 2018

When Morgan then helpfully handed Trump his next line, “And you would disavow yourself of people like that,” Trump returned again to his main point. “I don’t want to be involved with people … but you’re telling me about these people ’cause I know nothing about these people,” Trump said.

While Morgan engaged in some creative editing of the president’s remarks to characterize them as an apology, the whole exchange closely echoed Trump’s weird attempt, in early 2016, to claim that he had never heard of American white supremacists like David Duke or the Ku Klux Klan.

.@realDonaldTrump: "I know nothing about David Duke" https://t.co/1FIKzrf8Kb #CNNSOTU https://t.co/hfEJArGwmv

— CNN (@CNN) February 28, 2016

“Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” Trump told Jake Tapper of CNN during the Republican primary campaign. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists, so, I don’t know. … You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.”

Trump’s sudden difficulty in recalling who exactly the former Klan leader was came five months after he had responded to a question from John Heilemann of Bloomberg News — “Would you repudiate David Duke?” — by saying: “Sure, I would do that, if it made you feel better. I don’t know anything about him. Somebody told me yesterday, whoever he is, he did endorse me.”

Top photo: President Donald Trump was interviewed this week by his friend Piers Morgan.

The post Donald Trump Might Apologize for Retweeting British Racists, If It Means So Much to You appeared first on The Intercept.

We therefore regard as inherently serious strident warnings from public officials alleging that the FBI and Department of Justice have abused their spying power for political purposes. Social media last night and today have been flooded with inflammatory and quite dramatic claims now being made by congressional Republicans about a four-page memo alleging abuses of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act spying processes during the 2016 election. This memo, which remains secret, was reportedly written under the direction of the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, and has been read by dozens of members of Congress after the committee voted to make the memo available to all members of the House of Representatives to examine in a room specially designated for reviewing classified material.

The rhetoric issuing from GOP members who read the memo is notably extreme. North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, called the memo “troubling” and “shocking” and said, “Part of me wishes that I didn’t read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.” GOP Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania stated: “You think about, ‘Is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That’s how alarming it is.”

This has led to a ferocious outcry on the right to “release the memo” – and presumably thereby prove that the Obama administration conducted unlawful surveillance on the Trump campaign and transition. On Thursday night, Fox News host and stalwart Trump ally Sean Hannity claimed that the memo described “the systematic abuse of power, the weaponizing of those powerful tools of intelligence and the shredding of our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights.”

Given the significance of this issue, it is absolutely true that the memo should be declassified and released to the public — and not just the memo itself. The House Intelligence Committee generally and Nunes specifically have a history of making unreliable and untrue claims (its report about Edward Snowden was full of falsehoods, as Bart Gellman amply documented, and prior claims from Nunes about “unmasking” have been discredited). Thus, mere assertions from Nunes — or anyone else — are largely worthless; Republicans should provide American citizens not merely with the memo they claim reveals pervasive criminality and abuse of power, but also with all of the evidence underlying its conclusions.

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have the power, working together or separately, to immediately declassify all the relevant information. And if indeed the GOP’s explosive claims are accurate – if, as HPSCI member Steve King, R-Iowa, says, this is “worse than Watergate” — they obviously have every incentive to get it into the public’s hands as soon as possible. Indeed, one could argue that they have the duty to do so.

On the other hand, if the GOP’s claims are false or significantly misleading – if they are, with the deepest cynicism imaginable, simply using these crucial issues to whip up their base or discredit the Mueller investigation, or exaggerating or making claims that lack any evidentiary support, or trying to have the best of all worlds by making explosive claims about the memo but never having to prove their truth — then they will either not release the memo or they will release it without any supporting documentation, making it impossible for Americans to judge its accuracy for themselves.

Anyone who is genuinely concerned about the claims being made about eavesdropping abuses should understand why the issue of evidence is so critical. After all, the House, Senate, and FBI investigations into any Trump collusion with Russia have so far proceeded with many startling claims in the media, but to date little hard evidence for the public to judge. Nobody rational should be assuming any claims or assertions from partisan actors about the 2016 election are true without seeing evidence to substantiate those claims.

The good news is there are at least four easy ways for congressional Republicans and/or Trump to definitively prove that all the right’s darkest suspicions about the Obama administration are true. If this memo and the underlying documents prove even a fraction of what GOP politicians and media figures are claiming about them, then what could possibly justify its ongoing concealment? Any or all of these methods should be promptly invoked to ensure that the public sees this evidence:

1. Trump can declassify anything he wants.

All classification by the U.S. government has no basis in laws passed by Congress (with one tiny exception that is irrelevant here). Rather, all classification is based on presidential executive orders, which rely on the president’s constitutional role as commander in chief of the armed forces. According to the Supreme Court, the presidential power “to classify and control access to information bearing on national security … flows primarily from the constitutional investment of power in the president.”

That means presidents can also declassify anything they chose to — for any reason or no reason — as they have done in the past. George W. Bush, under pressure in 2004, declassified the section of the 2001 presidential daily brief headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Barack Obama declassified the Justice Department memos produced during the Bush presidency on the legality of torture.

Thus if the House Intelligence Committee merely releases a version of its memo without the supporting documentation, that won’t be just because they don’t want Americans to see it – it will be because Trump doesn’t want us to see it either. Note that GOP House members are insistent that releasing the memo and the underlying source material would not remotely harm national security:

Releasing this classified info doesn't compromise good sources & methods. It reveals the feds' reliance on bad sources & methods.

— Lee Zeldin (@LeeMZeldin) January 18, 2018

So what possible justification is there for Trump to continue to conceal this alleged evidence of massive criminality from the American people by hiding it behind “classified” designations? Indeed, it is illegal to abuse classified designations to hide evidence of official criminality: so not only can Trump declassify such evidence, one could argue that he must, or at least should.

2. The House (and Senate) intelligence committees can declassify any material they possess.

According to the procedural rules of both houses of Congress, their intelligence committees can declassify material in their possession if the committee votes that such declassification would be in the public interest. It is then declassified after five days unless the president formally objects. If the president does object, the full chamber votes on the question.

It is true that – in a measure of how embarrassingly deferential Congress is to the executive branch – neither the House nor the Senate intelligence committees has ever utilized this power, so it’s impossible to know how this gambit would play out in practice. But if Trump refused to release proof of the Obama administration’s misdeeds, congressional Republicans should have a straightforward way to overrule him.

3. The Constitution protects members of Congress from prosecution for “any speech or debate in either House.”

Members of Congress have legal immunity for acts they commit as part of the legislative process. Article I, Section 6, clause 1 of the Constitution states that “for any speech or debate in either House, [Senators and Representatives] shall not be questioned in any other place.” It is this constitutional shield that protected Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska from legal consequences in 1971 when he read sections of the Pentagon Papers during a meeting of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, and then placed the rest of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.

It’s true that members could face legal consequences for ancillary acts — perhaps if they unlawfully removed the relevant material from the congressional SCIF. But they could go to the House floor and describe both the memo’s revelations and the underlying evidence for it without any fear of legal consequences.

If the memo really proves what they claim, it would seem to be their patriotic duty would compel them do this. Ordinary citizens — like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning — have risked prison in order to expose what they believed were serious official crimes; these members of Congress can do this without any of those consequences. So what justifies their failure to do this?

4. Republicans can leak everything to the news media.

If for some reason Trump and the congressional leadership refuse to use any of the above options to vindicate themselves, a brave member of Congress could turn whistleblower and transmit the classified proof of the GOP’s claims about the memo to the news media.

Many outlets now have secure methods of sending sensitive material to them, such as Secure Drop. Those for The Intercept can be found here. (All leaking entails risks, as we describe in our manual for whistleblowers.)

So that’s that. All Americans, particularly conservatives, should ask every Republican making spectacular assertions about this memo when they will be using the above ways to conclusively demonstrate that everything they’ve said is based in rock-solid fact.

If they do not, Republicans will conclusively demonstrate something else. They will prove conclusively that all of this is about them shamelessly making claims they do not actually believe, fraudulently posturing as caring about one of the most vital, fundamental issues facing the United States: how the U.S. government uses the vast surveillance powers with which it has been vested.

Top photo: The official seal of the FBI is seen on an iPhone’s camera screen outside the J. Edgar Hoover headquarters in Washington, on Feb. 23, 2016.

The post Republicans Have Four Easy Ways to #ReleaseTheMemo — and the Evidence for It. Not Doing So Will Prove Them to Be Shameless Frauds. appeared first on The Intercept.

While her whistleblowing made her a hero around the world, Manning has also now become an icon of LGBT equality and transgender rights with an act of profound bravery that at least matches, if not surpasses, her whistleblowing. She announced her transition and demanded the dignity and treatment to which she was entitled, while she was imprisoned in the middle of a sprawling U.S. military base, in a brig at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Since her release from prison, she has become a visible and outspoken advocate for the rights of trans people. She has used her position as a Guardian columnist to stake out a wide range of positions, including drafting a proposed law to provide protections for whistleblowers. She certainly has more political experience and activism than many other Senate candidates previously supported by the Democratic establishment (Al Franken comes to mind as one example). If elected, Manning would become the first transgender woman ever, and the youngest woman ever, to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Manning’s opponent in the Democratic Party primary is one of the most standard, banal, typical, privileged, and mediocre politicians in the U.S. Congress: Benjamin Cardin, a 74-year-old white, straight man who is seeking his third six-year Senate term. Cardin’s decadeslong career as a politician from the start has been steeped in unearned privilege: He first won elective office back in 1966, when his uncle, Maurice Cardin, gave up his seat in order to bequeath it to his nephew Benjamin. With this dynastic privilege as his base, he has spent the last 50 years climbing the political ladder in Maryland.

Cardin has remarkably few achievements for being in Congress for so many years. One of his few distinctions is that he has become one of the Senate’s most reliable and loyal supporters of AIPAC’s agenda and the Israeli government, if not the single most loyal. In 2015, he joined with Lindsey Graham in kicking off the annual AIPAC conference, causing neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin to gush about how identical they sounded.

But Cardin’s crowning achievement came last year when he authored a bill that would have made it a felony to support a boycott of Israel — a bill that was such a profound assault on basic First Amendment freedoms that the ACLU instantly denounced it and multiple senators who had co-sponsored Cardin’s bill (such as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand) announced that they were withdrawing their support.

Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, establishment Democrats wasted no time in mocking and denouncing Manning’s bid to become the first-ever trans woman in the Senate, instead quickly lining up in support behind the straight, white male who has wielded power for decades. To demean Manning, many of these establishment Democrats invoked the primary tactic they now reflexively use against anyone they view as a political adversary: They depicted her as a tool of the Kremlin, whose candidacy is really just a disguised plot engineered by Moscow.

Leading the way in spreading this obviously deranged but acceptable-in-D.C. conspiracy theory was Neera Tanden, president of the largest Democratic Party think tank in Washington. Last night, Tanden spread a viral tweet that strongly implied — without even pretending to have a shred of evidence — that the Kremlin had engineered Manning’s candidacy as punishment for Cardin’s hard-line position on Russia:

This conspiracy theory mocks itself. The idea that Vladimir Putin sat in the Kremlin, steaming over Cardin’s report on Russia and thus, developed a dastardly plot to rid himself of his daunting Maryland nemesis — “I know how to get rid of Cardin: I’ll have a trans woman who was convicted of felony leaking run against him!” — is too inane to merit any additional ridicule. But this is the climate in Washington: No conspiracy theory is too moronic, too demented, too self-evidently laughable to disqualify its advocates from being taken seriously — as long as it involves accusations that someone is a covert tool of the Kremlin. That’s why the president of the leading Democratic think tank feels free to spread this slanderous trash.

(As a side note: Tanden’s ongoing attempt to smear all of her critics as agents of a foreign power is particularly ironic given that the think tank she runs, the Center for American Progress, conceals the identity of many of its largest donors, but admits that one of its largest contributors is one of the world’s most repressive regimes. If there’s any entity worthy of the type of disloyalty innuendo that Tanden loves to spread, it’s the one she runs:

Why have so many establishment Democrats so quickly decided to back a white, straight male politician steeped in privilege, while devoting themselves to opposing a candidate who would make history by becoming the first trans woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate, in the process inspiring trans youth around the world and helping to erode the stigma that has made them so vulnerable to discrimination and violence?

They’ve decided to do this presumably because they find Cardin’s centrist ideology and politics more appealing than Manning’s more radical politics and believe that this trumps what could be the historic value of Manning’s candidacy. They’ve apparently decided to prioritize their own centrist ideology over the important gender, sexual orientation, and trans equality progress that Manning’s victory would ensure.

One can certainly make an argument that the license they’ve granted themselves here — to prioritize ideology and politics over identity — is a reasonable one. But one wonders whether they intend to maintain a monopoly on this license or extend it to others.

Update: Jan. 16, 2018

Establishment Democrats have spent all day attacking this article with one claim: that it cites “only” one example of a Democrat who depicted Manning’s candidacy as a Kremlin plot — CAP President Neera Tanden — and therefore it’s baseless to say that there’s a smear “campaign” against Manning from centrist Democrats. It’s worth making a few points about this claim:

1. The idea that Tanden is just some random person I picked off Twitter whose views are irrelevant to Democratic Party politics — when she is in fact the president of the largest and most influential Democratic Party think tank in Washington (which is why I cited her) — is really quite laughable.
2. This objection is completely ancillary to the actual point of this article, which is the extremely inconsistent, self-serving way that centrist Democrats use identity politics: They give themselves license to support old, straight, white men at the expense of pioneering minority candidates when doing so advances their ideological agenda, whereas leftists who do so are vilified for doing the same thing (see the rhetoric from Hillary Clinton supporters in the 2016 Democratic Party primary about the misogynistic, malignant motives of Bernie Sanders supporters for how that works).
3. The fact that I cited “only” Tanden does not mean that she was the only one spreading this inane Kremlin conspiracy theory about Manning’s candidacy. The claim was all over Twitter. It was re-tweeted thousands of time. I obviously couldn’t list all of the instances in a single article, so I chose the most important one. But for those who need to see more, here are several, beginning with this former official from the Clinton campaign:

https://twitter.com/Zac_Petkanas/status/952982355228221443

Then we have this, from one of the U.S. media’s favorite Russia-obsessed “experts”:

Then we have one of the #Resistance’s most beloved MSNBC personalities, helping to spread the same conspiracy theory as the one Tanden re-tweeted:

And then we have this from the former RT anchor, who is widely celebrated in Democratic Party circles for having left the network:

Chelsea Manning has for years been a celebrated hero in Russian media. Putin would love to see her win a U.S. Senate seat

— Liz Wahl (@lizwahl) January 14, 2018

I could literally spend the rest of the evening posting examples from large accounts that — within 24 hours of Manning’s announcement of her candidacy — tried to tie her and her campaign to the Kremlin. Even if it had “just” been the head of the Center for American Progress doing it, that would have justified this article; but clearly, it was far more widespread and coordinated than that.

And just to underscore the point again: This issue is totally ancillary to the primary point of the article, which is about how centrist Democrats exploit identity politics when it suits them, but then feel free to keep old, white, straight men in power at the expense of marginalized minority candidates, such as Manning.

Top photo: Chelsea Manning attends the 22nd Annual OUT100 Celebration Gala at the Altman Building on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017, in New York.

The post Centrist Democrats Launch Smear Campaign Against Young Transgender Woman, All to Keep an Old, Straight, White Man in Power appeared first on The Intercept.

So POTUS has endorsed the views of a vile, hate-filled racist organisation that hates me and people like me. He is wrong and I refuse to let it go and say nothing

— Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) November 29, 2017

Re Trump’s visit: it’s vital we have a total and complete shutdown of fascist Presidents entering the UK until we can figure out what’s going on.

— David Schneider (@davidschneider) November 30, 2017

The condemnation of Trump from leading politicians across the spectrum, which began on Wednesday, accelerated on Thursday during a debate in Parliament on what was formally termed the “urgent question” of “the activities of Britain First, online hate speech and the sharing of inflammatory content online by the president of the United States, Donald Trump.”

Feels like a pivotal historic moment as MPs on all sides of the Commons line up to call Trump "stupid", "racist or incompetent", "fascist" and so on: consequences could be far-reaching.

— Jim Pickard ? (@PickardJE) November 30, 2017

The debate began with the Home Secretary Amber Rudd, a Conservative whose office maintains a list of extremists banned from entering the U.K. for hate speech, repeating Prime Minister Theresa May’s position that “this government will not tolerate any groups who spread hate be demonizing those of other faiths or ethnicities and who deliberately raise community fears and tensions — and we have been clear, President Donald Trump was wrong to retweet videos posted by far-right group Britain First.”

Amber Rudd repeats Downing Street's condemnation of Trump's Britain First tweets pic.twitter.com/lGlgrDjo9l

— ES Magazine (@ESMagOfficial) November 30, 2017

Diane Abbott, the Labour politician in line to become home secretary should her party form the next government, said that Trump’s promotion of anti-Muslim propaganda by Britain First “is not just offensive to British people of Muslim heritage, it is not just offensive to British people of black and minority heritage, it is offensive to all decent British people.”

Donald Trump retweeting Britain First is offensive to "all decent British people", says Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott https://t.co/1KB9Jf15y1 pic.twitter.com/jmOcaQQ1mN

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) November 30, 2017

When another Conservative member of parliament, Peter Bone, suggested that the world would be a better place “if the prime minister could persuade the president of the United States to delete his Twitter account,” Rudd replied that “many of us might share his view.”

UK lawmaker: "Wouldn't the world be a better place if the Prime Minister could persuade the President of the United States to delete his Twitter account?"

Home Secretary: "To note my honorable friend's advice regarding Twitter accounts- I'm sure many of us might share his view." pic.twitter.com/WUg6sPWBEb

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 30, 2017

Chris Bryant, a member of the opposition Labour party who suggested on Wednesday that Trump should be arrested for inciting religious hatred should he step foot in Britain, led calls for the government to revoke its invitation for the president to enjoy a state visit to the U.K. The planned visit was already postponed earlier this year after Trump launched an unhinged Twitter broadside at the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack in the British capital.

'You cannot stand up to horrible racism – or pretend to do so – and invite the man in through the front door'@RhonddaBryant objects to @realDonaldTrump's far-right retweets pic.twitter.com/8IkOYMP6fo

— BBC Wales Politics (@WalesPolitics) November 30, 2017

The call to cancel the visit was echoed by London’s mayor, whose Muslim faith is clearly the reason Trump has singled him out for criticism on numerous occasions.

President Trump has used Twitter to promote a vile, extremist group that exists solely to sow division and hatred in our country. It's increasingly clear that any official visit from President Trump to Britain would not be welcomed. pic.twitter.com/oZ1Kt0JCfY

— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) November 30, 2017

Rudd said that the invitation would not be rescinded but hinted that it would not take place any time soon.

Amber Rudd repeats arrangements have not been made for the visit, implying they won’t be. But there will be no withdrawal of the offer.

— Krishnan Guru-Murthy (@krishgm) November 30, 2017

Given that the U.K. is committed to leaving the EU, striking a trade deal with the United States is considered essential by many Conservatives, so the government is loathe to risk offending Trump by canceling the visit.

Still, as another Labour member, Yvette Cooper, argued, even as “we agree on the importance of our relationship with the U.S. and our peoples have stood together against far-right extremism and against Islamist extremism and will do so again, but that is exactly why we cannot pander now because Britain First gets its succor from spreading its poison and its extremism online, that is how it works. And the president of the United States has just given it a rocket boost in promoting hatred in our communities.”

New battle for democracy is online. It's why we can't pander to @realDonaldTrump over online hate pic.twitter.com/dZB1QlWpll

— Yvette Cooper (@YvetteCooperMP) November 30, 2017

“No matter what diplomatic route we find to do it,” Cooper added, “we cannot simply roll out a red carpet and give a platform for the president of the United States to also sow discord in our communities.” Britons know from their own history, she said, “where the spread of extremism leads, unless enough of us are prepared to stand up now and say no.”

Brendan Cox, whose late wife Jo was the pro-Europe British politician assassinated last year by a deranged white supremacist screaming “Britain First,” responded with anger and then sarcasm to Trump’s miffed tweet that May should not “focus on me.”

.@Theresa_May, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2017

You have a mass shooting every single day in your country, your murder rate is many times that of the UK, your healthcare system is a disgrace, you can’t pass anything through a congress that you control. I would focus on that. https://t.co/SNcqOZGvLQ

— Brendan Cox (@MrBrendanCox) November 30, 2017

I feel sorry for the UK ambassador. “Yes of course we want the visit to happen Mr President Sir, it’s just the Queen is really busy this side of 2020, you know, what with the wedding, and er Brexit and… er… Corgis”

— Brendan Cox (@MrBrendanCox) November 30, 2017

Top photo: During a debate in the House of Commons on Thursday, Amber Rudd, the British home secretary, criticized Donald Trump for retweeting videos posted by the far-right group Britain First.

The post A Kingdom United in Revulsion at Donald Trump’s Embrace of Far-Right Racists appeared first on The Intercept.

The revelation that WikiLeaks secretly offered help to Donald Trump’s campaign, in a series of private Twitter messages sent to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr., gave ammunition to the group’s many detractors and also sparked anger from some longtime supporters of the organization and its founder, Julian Assange.

One of the most high-profile dissenters was journalist Barrett Brown, whose crowdsourced investigations of hacked corporate documents later posted on WikiLeaks led to a prison sentence.

Brown had a visceral reaction to the news, first reported by The Atlantic, that WikiLeaks had been advising the Trump campaign. In a series of tweets and Facebook videos, Brown accused Assange of having compromised “the movement” to expose corporate and government wrongdoing by acting as a covert political operative.

Brown explained that he had defended WikiLeaks for releasing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, “because it was an appropriate thing for a transparency org to do.” But, he added, “working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting.”

He was particularly outraged by an Oct. 21, 2016 message, in which Assange had appealed to Trump Jr. to let WikiLeaks publish one or more of his father’s tax returns in order to make his group’s attacks on Hillary Clinton seem less biased. “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” the Assange-controlled @Wikileaks account suggested. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.”

A screenshot of a direct message from the WikiLeaks Twitter account to Donald Trump Jr.

As Brown pointed out in another tweet, it was all-caps exasperating that Assange was in this case “complaining about ‘slander’ of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP.”

The journalist, an Intercept contributor, whose work had been championed by WikiLeaks, also shared a link to a Reddit AMA conducted two days after the election in which WikiLeaks staff, including Assange’s longtime collaborator Sarah Harrison, had denied point-blank that they had collaborated with the Trump campaign.

https://twitter.com/BarrettBrown_/status/930216747877240837

“The allegations that we have colluded with Trump, or any other candidate for that matter, or with Russia, are just groundless and false,” the staffers wrote then. “We were not publishing with a goal to get any specific candidate elected.”

It is not surprising that Brown felt personally betrayed by Assange, since, as he explained on Facebook Tuesday night, “I went to prison because of my support for WikiLeaks.” Specifically, Brown said, the charges against him were related to his role in “operations to identify and punish members of the government and members of private companies that had been exposed by Anonymous hackers of my acquaintance, via email hacks, as having conspired to go after Assange, to go after WikiLeaks.”

That sort of activism, dedicated to making public secret wrongdoing, Brown argued, is very different from “colluding with an authoritarian presidential campaign backed by actual Nazis while publicly denying it.”

“Plainly,” he observed with bitterness, “the prospect of a Clinton in the White House was such an unimaginable nightmare scenario that all normal standards of truth and morality became moot and it became necessary to get people like Sebastian Gorka into the White House to establish order.”

Before his private messages to Trump Jr. were leaked, Assange himself had categorically denied that he or WikiLeaks had been attacking Hillary Clinton to help elect Donald Trump. “This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election,” he wrote in a statement released on November 8 as Americans went to the polls.

Even though Assange had by then transformed the WikiLeaks Twitter feed into a vehicle for smearing Clinton, he insisted that his work was journalistic in nature. “The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks — an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself,” Assange wrote. “Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us,” he added. “It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment.”

The same morning, WikiLeaks tweeted an attack on Clinton for not having driven her own car during her decades of public service.

Clinton: out of touch, cronyistic, didn't drive a car in 35 years, flew all over the world but accomplished nothing https://t.co/dc2OjdPIII pic.twitter.com/P8yiYkD6bO

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 8, 2016

For Brown, and others who have been critical of Assange for using the platform of WikiLeaks to fight his own political and personal battles, his secret communication with the Trump campaign was damning because it revealed that he had been functioning more like a freelance political operative, doling out strategy and advice, than a journalist interested in obtaining and publishing information, concerned only with its accuracy.

James Ball, a former WikiLeaks volunteer who has described the difficulty of working for someone who lies so much, was also appalled by one post-election message to Trump Jr., in which WikiLeaks suggested that, as a form of payback, it would be “helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC.”

That request for payback, on December 16, 2016, came three weeks after Trump’s father had called on the British government to make his friend Nigel Farage its ambassador. “This should be it, game over, end of it, for anyone who tries to suggest Assange looks out for anyone except himself,” Ball observed on Twitter. “That’s his cause, and plenty of good people have been played, badly.”

There was also criticism from journalists like Chris Hayes of MSNBC, a network Assange accused of being, along with the New York Times, “the most biased source” in one note to Trump Jr. Pointing to a message from WikiLeaks sent on Election Day, advising Trump to refuse to concede and claim the election was rigged, Hayes asked how, exactly, offering that sort of political advice squared with the organization’s mission to promote transparency.

A screenshot of a Nov. 8, 2016 DM to Donald Trump Jr. from WikiLeaks.

Still, many of Assange’s most vocal supporters stuck with him, calling even secret communication with the Trump campaign to undermine Clinton entirely consistent with his vision of WikiLeaks as a sort of opposition research group, dedicated to “crushing bastards” by finding dirt in the servers of powerful individuals or organizations.

As Raffi Khatchadourian explained in a New Yorker profile of the WikiLeaks founder in 2010, “Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.” To Assange, Khatchadourian wrote, “Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.”

One steadfast Assange ally was Kim Dotcom, founder of the shuttered file-sharing site MegaUpload, who helped fuel a conspiracy theory that the DNC emails had not been hacked by Russia, but provided to WikiLeaks by a young Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who was subsequently murdered. Alluding to another entirely unsubstantiated allegation — that Clinton had once suggested killing Assange in a drone strike — Dotcom said that the WikiLeaks founder was merely part of a crowdsourced political operation that had successfully defeated the greater evil.

I think what @JulianAssange wrote to @DonaldJTrumpJr is perfectly fine. Who’s surprised? He doesn’t like Hillary. She wanted to assassinate him with a drone for publishing the truth. And he’s fishing for information like any good editor. We wanted to prevent Hillary and we did!

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) November 14, 2017

As it happens, one of the anti-Clinton rumors that WikiLeaks had urged Trump Jr. to “push” in an October 3, 2016 message was a tweet linking to that unsubstantiated allegation in an unsigned blog post citing anonymous sources. The blog post includes no documentation of the allegation, but the WikiLeaks tweet linking to it, which Trump Jr. told Assange he did share, included an excerpt from the blog post in which the type was styled to look like a leaked document.

Hillary Clinton on Assange "Can't we just drone this guy" — report https://t.co/S7tPrl2QCZ pic.twitter.com/qy2EQBa48y

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 3, 2016

As Jesse Singal reported for New York magazine the day after that tweet was posted, and quickly went viral, there was no reason to believe that anonymous blogger had any source at all for the claim. The post does reference one email sent to Clinton, which was not leaked but archived by the State Department, in which one of her advisers said that a memo had been prepared of “possible legal and nonlegal strategies re wikileaks.” But, as Singal explained: “‘non-legal’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘illegal’ — rather, it’s a fairly common term in government, and it can refer to basically anything that doesn’t directly involve the legal system. If you run Google searches over the websites of the White House or the State or Justice Departments, for example, those searches will yield a handful of hits in which the U.S. government speaks openly of ‘nonlegal’ this or that, none of which are open admissions of lawbreaking.”

Earlier in the campaign, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed had also shared video from 2010 of a Fox News pundit, Bob Beckel, calling for Assange’s assassination, with a caption that incorrectly identified him as a “Hillary Clinton strategist.”

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763380671796678656

Beckel did not work for Clinton. He served in the State Department during the Carter administration, three decades before Clinton was secretary of state, and then ran Walter Mondale’s failed campaign for the presidency in 1984.

While WikiLeaks has undoubtedly facilitated the release of information that is both true and important, it is Assange’s Trump-like willingness to traffic in such unsubstantiated rumors, conspiracy theories, and innuendo not supported by evidence that undermines his claim to be a disinterested publisher, not a political operative.

This willingness to traffic in false or misleading information was very much in evidence during his work on behalf of Trump, and it is a consistent feature of Assange’s advocacy for other people and causes.

During the final week of the Brexit campaign last year, Assange tried to undermine the credibility of a witness to the savage murder of a pro-European Union member of parliament, Jo Cox. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Brexit supporters like Assange were concerned that a wave of sympathy for the murdered MP could sway the vote. So they set out to contest evidence that the killing had been politically motivated.

To that end, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed drew attention to the fact that one witness to the killing — who said he had heard the attacker shout “Britain First!” — might have belonged to a racist political group, the British National Party, whose membership rolls WikiLeaks had obtained. Within hours of the murder, WikiLeaks also shared a link to a conspiratorial post from the pro-Brexit Breitbart U.K., which speculated that the witness might have lied about what he heard as part of a feud among far-right racist groups.

UK: "witness" who claimed MP slayer shouted "Britain First!" appears in BNP list https://t.co/pCSc1HOmqV #Brexit pic.twitter.com/qgylg91u3T

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 17, 2016

The next day, British police confirmed that the attacker told the arresting officers he was a “political activist” and had indeed shouted pro-Brexit phrases, including “Britain First,” during the murder.

More recently, during the separatist protests in Catalonia he supported, Assange was forced to delete several fake or misleading images he had shared on Twitter — including one photograph he mistakenly said showed the head of Spanish military police kissing a flag at a demonstration, and another of Spanish police officers struggling with Catalans, which had been digitally altered to insert a Catalan independence flag.

Hi @JulianAssange

WRONG PERSON.

That is not Ángel Gonzalo. pic.twitter.com/vzqPEaXJi8

— MALDITO BULO (@malditobulo) October 8, 2017

A screenshot of a fake image Julian Assange shared and later deleted.

In the final months of the 2016 presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed promoted not just its new publications, but also frequently referred to tabloid rumors — like old chestnuts about Hillary Clinton’s supposed “role in the death of White House counsel Vince Foster” — and wild conspiracy theories about her campaign chair taking part in bloody satanic rituals.

FBI interview with Hillary Clinton over death of White House aid have gone 'missing' from the US National Archives https://t.co/YCbOHqwlkb

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 23, 2016

The Podestas' "Spirit Cooking" dinner?
It's not what you think.
It's blood, sperm and breastmilk.
But mostly blood.https://t.co/gGPWFS3B2H pic.twitter.com/I43KiiraDh

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 4, 2016

We know now that, from late September on, Assange was also privately using that account to urge the candidate’s son to hype the mostly anodyne emails stolen from the account of campaign chair, John Podesta, as crucial evidence of Clinton’s unfitness for office. And it certainly looks like the campaign took his advice.

On October 12, 2016, just 15 minutes after Assange told Trump Jr. that a new batch of Podesta emails had been released, with “many great stories the press are missing,” his father tweeted a complaint accusing “the dishonest media” of ignoring “incredible information provided by WikiLeaks.”

Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2016

In the same message, Assange urged Trump Jr. to share a link he provided to the email database — wlsearch.tk — so “you guys can get all your followers digging through the content.” Two days later, Trump Jr. shared that link.

For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: https://t.co/SGcEeM9rCS

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 14, 2016

Despite the constant claims from Assange and the Trumps that the emails stolen from Democrats implicated Clinton in scandal and corruption, it is important to keep in mind that the WikiLeaks method of encouraging Trump supporters and Reddit trolls to scour the documents for evidence of malfeasance did not, in fact, uncover any such evidence.

Instead, the hacked emails were used to reverse-engineer preposterous conspiracy theories, like the imaginary pedophilia scandal called Pizzagate, which WikiLeaks was still treating as real two months after the election.

CBS Reality Check covers Pizzagate. https://t.co/KNaKp1XONR

More: https://t.co/Sc1nFTAFgV

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 18, 2017

This is the real tragedy and menace of the public and private collaboration of WikiLeaks with Trump. An organization with a sterling reputation for providing the public with accurate information about secret government and corporate activities was used to launder conspiracy theories that helped elect a racist, sexual predator president of the United States.

That might be a terrific result for people like Julian Assange, who see a dysfunctional, discredited White House as a way to undermine what they see as the real evil empire. For Americans condemned to live under Trump, particularly the most marginalized who, as Noam Chomsky has observed, will suffer the most from his cruelty, it is a far more troubling outcome.

Update: Nov. 16, 2017, 8:55 a.m.

Some supporters of Julian Assange have argued that the October 21 direct message that so infuriated Barrett Brown — in which Assange argued that it would be good for the Trump campaign to allow WikiLeaks to publish one or more of Donald Trump’s tax returns — merely showed the publisher trying to obtain private material of public interest. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the proposal, explicitly presented as a way for WikiLeaks to seem to be less “pro-Trump,” would have compromised the organization’s principles, by disguising material released by a political campaign as a leak obtained from a whistleblower.

It is also important to remember what was happening in the news at that time. Three weeks before WikiLeaks solicited Trump’s tax information, an anonymous source mailed three pages from Trump’s 1995 tax return to The New York Times, which published an analysis showing that Trump had used entirely legal means to avoid paying federal taxes. Had the Trump campaign provided WikiLeaks with another old return, it is possible that the organization could have published tax information that would not have damaged Trump politically, but would have misled its readers into believing that the organization was working to undermine Trump as well as Clinton.

After Trump took office, a page from his 2005 tax return, showing that he had paid millions in taxes that year, was mailed anonymously to David Cay Johnston. The reporter speculated that the source could have been Trump himself, seeking to undercut the widespread assumption that there is embarrassing information contained in the more recent tax returns he broke with precedent to keep secret. “Donald,” Johnston told Rachel Maddow, “has a long history of leaking material about himself when he thinks it’s in his interest.”

It is also worth noting that this offer to help Trump came less than two weeks after The Washington Post had thrown the campaign into crisis, by revealing that the candidate had boasted of sexual assault in comments recorded during the taping of an “Access Hollywood” episode in 2005. The recording caught Trump saying that, “when you’re a star,” you can “do anything” to women, even “grab them by the pussy.” WikiLeaks released its first batch of emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, less than an hour after that report was published.

Editor’s Note: Nov. 17, 2017, 9:55 a.m.

Because of the phrasing of the original headline, this piece was mischaracterized as an Intercept editorial. The headline has been changed to clarify that it is a news article reflecting the author’s analysis.

Top photo: Julian Assange addressed the media from the balcony of Ecuador’s London embassy in May 2017.

The post Julian Assange’s Hatred of Hillary Clinton Was No Secret. His Advice to Donald Trump Was. appeared first on The Intercept.

The design of Twitter, where many political journalists spend their time, is in large part responsible for this damage. Its space constraints mean that tweeted headlines or tiny summaries of reporting are often assumed to be true with no critical analysis of their accuracy and are easily spread. Claims from journalists that people want to believe are shared like wildfire, while less popular subsequent corrections or nuanced debunking are easily ignored. Whatever one’s views are on the actual impact of Twitter Russian bots, surely the propensity of journalistic falsehoods to spread far and wide is at least as significant.

Just in the last week alone, there have been four major factually false claims that have gone viral because journalists on Twitter endorsed and spread them: three about the controversy involving Donna Brazile and the Democratic National Committee, and one about documents and emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. It’s well worth examining them, both to document what the actual truth is, as well as to understand how often and easily this online journalistic misleading occurs.

Viral Falsehood #1

The Clinton/DNC agreement cited by Brazile only applied to the general election, not the primary.

On Wednesday, Politico published a blockbuster accusation from Brazile’s new book: that the DNC had “rigged” the 2016 primary election for Hillary Clinton through an agreement that gave Clinton control over key aspects of the DNC, a claim that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., endorsed on CNN. The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news.

The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense: Brazile was wrong because the agreement in question (a copy of which they provided to Seitz-Wald) applied “only to preparations for the general election” and had nothing to do with the primary season. That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked. This post documents how quickly this claim was endorsed on Twitter by journalists and Democratic operatives, and how far and wide it therefore spread.

The problem with this claim is that it is blatantly and obviously false. All one has to do to know this is read the agreement. Unlike the journalists spreading this DNC defense, Campaign Legal Center’s Brendan Fischer bothered to read it, and immediately saw and documented how obviously false this claim is:

The NBC article that was originally used to spread this claim now includes what amounts to a serious walk-back, if not outright retraction, of the DNC’s principal defense:

DNC and Clinton allies pointed to the fact that the agreement contained self-justifying lawyer language claiming that it is “focused exclusively on preparations for the General,” but, as Fischer noted, that passage “is contradicted by the rest of the agreement.” This would be like creating a contract to explicitly bribe an elected official (“A will pay Politician B to vote YES on Bill X”), then adding a throwaway paragraph with a legalistic disclaimer that “nothing in this agreement is intended to constitute a bribe,” and then have journalists cite that paragraph to proclaim that no bribe happened even though the agreement on its face explicitly says the opposite.

The Clinton/DNC agreement explicitly vested the Clinton campaign with control over key matters during the primary season: the exact opposite of what journalists on Twitter caused hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to believe. Nonetheless, DNC-loyal commentators continue to cite headlines and tweets citing the legalistic language to convince huge numbers of people that the truth is the exact opposite of what it actually is:

Viral Falsehood #2

Sanders signed the same agreement with the DNC that Clinton did.

To make the Clinton/DNC agreement appear benign and normal, the claim was quickly and widely circulated that Bernie Sanders had also signed the same agreement with the DNC as Clinton had. This, too, was false — in the most fundamental way possible.

Simply put, the agreement Sanders signed with the DNC — which the Sanders camp appears to have provided ABC News in order to debunk the claim — did not contain any of the provisions vesting control over the DNC that made the Clinton agreement cited by Brazile so controversial. As ABC News put it (emphasis added):

A joint fundraising agreement between the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Democratic National Committee — obtained Friday by ABC News and signed at the start of the primary campaign for the 2016 presidential election — does not include any language about coordinating on strategic decisions over hiring or budget, unlike a fundraising memo between the Hillary Clinton team and the DNC.

It’s possible that had Sanders wanted to invoke his funding arrangement with the DNC, and then signed a second agreement, it might have included similar control provisions. But it’s also possible that it would not have. We’ll never know, because it never happened. What we actually know for certain — what exists in reality — is that Sanders never signed any agreement with the DNC that contained the control provisions that were given in 2015 to the Clinton campaign. In other words, the provisions cited by Brazile in her “rigging” allegation did not exist in any contract signed with the DNC by the Sanders campaign.

Needless to say, a tiny fraction of those who were exposed to the original falsehood (Sanders signed the same agreement as Clinton) ended up seeing this fundamental reversal, because the journalists who promoted the original falsehood felt no compunction, as usual, to provide the less pleasing correction.

Viral Falsehood #3

Brazile stupidly thought she could unilaterally remove Clinton as the nominee.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an article reporting on various claims made in Brazile’s new book. The headline, which was widely tweeted, made it seem as though Brazile delusionally believed she had a power which, obviously, she did not in fact possess: “Donna Brazile: I considered replacing Clinton with Biden as 2016 Democratic nominee.” The article said Brazile considered exercising this power after Clinton’s fainting spell made her worry that Clinton was physically debilitated, and her campaign was “anemic” and had taken on “the odor of failure.”

Brazile — as a result of her stinging criticisms and accusations of Clinton, Obama, and the DNC — is currently Public Enemy No. 1 among Democrats in the media. So they seized on this headline to pretend that she claimed the power to unilaterally remove Clinton on a whim and then used this claim to mercilessly vilify her — the chair of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, last year’s interim head of the DNC, and a long-time Democratic Party operative — as a deluded, insane, dishonest, profiteering, ignorant fabulist who lacks all credibility.

But the entire attack on Brazile was false. She did not claim, at least according to the Post article being cited, that she had the power to unilaterally remove Clinton. The original Post article, buried deep down in the article, well after the headline, made clear that she was referencing a complicated process in the DNC charter that allowed for removal of a nominee who had become incapacitated.

The Post then amended its story to reflect that she made no such absurd claim in her book, but rather noted that “the DNC charter empowered her to initiate replacement of the nominee” and that “if a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee a complicated process of filling the vacancy that would include a meeting of the full DNC.” The Post then added this note to the top of the article:

Journalists on Twitter spent hours yesterday mocking, maligning, and attacking the reputation of Brazile for a claim that she simply never made — all because a tweeted headline, which they never bothered to read past or evaluate, made them think they were justified in doing so in order to malign someone who has, quickly and bizarrely, become one of the Democrats’ primary enemies.

Viral Falsehood #4

Evidence has emerged proving that the content of WikiLeaks documents and emails was doctored. 

Last year, from the time WikiLeaks began publishing emails and documents from the DNC and John Podesta’s email inbox, Clinton officials and their media supporters have constantly insinuated, and sometimes outright stated, that the WikiLeaks documents were frauds because they had been altered. What was most notable about this accusation was how easily it would have been proven had it really been true. All anyone had to do was show the actual, original email that they sent or received, and then compare it to the altered WikiLeaks version, and that would have been proof that the WikiLeaks archive was unreliable.

But that never happened. Never once did any of the dozens of Democratic Party operatives who sent or received the emails published by WikiLeaks point to a single specific case of an alteration — something that, obviously, they would have eagerly done had they been able to. As Politico noted last year (emphasis added):

Clinton’s team hasn’t challenged the accuracy of even the most salacious emails released in the past four days, including those featuring aides making snarky references to Catholicism or a Bill Clinton protégé describing Chelsea Clinton as a “spoiled brat.” And numerous digital forensic firms told POLITICO that they haven’t seen any proof of tampering in the emails they’ve examined — adding that only the hacked Democrats themselves could offer that kind of conclusive evidence.

Similarly, when PolitiFact tried last year to fact-check the Clinton campaign’s claims that the documents were doctored, they noted: “The Clinton campaign, however, has yet to produce any evidence that any specific emails in the latest leak were fraudulent.”

Nonetheless, the desire to believe this persisted. And this week, Associated Press published a report that countless journalists seized upon to claim that proof finally had emerged that the WikiLeaks documents had been altered. The claim in the AP report is incredibly simple and limited. It does not involve any claim that WikiLeaks altered any documents, or that any of the emails it published were frauds; rather, the claim is that Guccifer, on one of the documents that he published, placed a “confidential” watermark that did not appear on another version:

The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta’s inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The official said the word “CONFIDENTIAL” was not in the original document .

Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.

There are so many reasons to question whether this actually happened. To begin with, the fact that one version of the document is without a “confidential” watermark doesn’t mean no version has one; it’s common to add watermarks of that sort for different purposes and different recipients. Moreover, AP’s only basis is an anonymous source claiming the document had been altered, along with the version that lacks the watermark. This is very far from proof that Guccifer “airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.”

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Guccifer did, in fact, add a “confidential” watermark to this document to entice journalists to view the document as more appetizing. This does not remotely justify the claim that any of the documents and emails published by WikiLeaks were materially altered and were thus unreliable.

First, Guccifer adding a watermark to a document he circulated does not mean that any of the emails published by WikiLeaks in its archive was altered. It’s long been known that Guccifer altered the documents’ metadata to hide its path, but nobody ever tried to cite that as proof that anything published by WikiLeaks was fraudulent (indeed, PolitiFact cited Guccifer’s alteration of metadata when concluding there was no evidence that the WikiLeaks documents themselves had been altered).

Second, this has no bearing on the content of the emails or documents themselves published by WikiLeaks, which, to date, nobody has demonstrated have been altered in the slightest. Third, if it were the case that any of the emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were fraudulent, it would still be incredibly easy to prove: All anyone would have to do is produce the original and show how the WikiLeaks version was altered. Why — a full year after WikiLeaks began publishing these documents — has nobody done this, despite the overwhelming incentive that exists to expose this?

In sum, evidence that the content of any of the WikiLeaks emails was altered is nonexistent, while there is overwhelming reason to believe none has been (beginning with the fact that, as easy it would be to do so, no proof has been provided after all this time). Nonetheless, as a result of journalists’ conduct on Twitter this week, the false claim that emails and documents in the WikiLeaks archive were proven to be altered is now viral and will remain fixed in people’s belief system forever:

There’s no way to prove the negative, that no emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were altered. But one should demand actual evidence before affirming this claim. And despite the ease of providing that proof, and the long period of time that has elapsed, none has been provided. But, unsurprisingly, that did not stop the claim that it had been proven from going viral this week on Twitter — all based on the tenuous claim that Guccifer added a “confidential” watermark to one of the documents he circulated.

It can certainly be menacing for Russian bots to disseminate divisive messaging on Twitter. But it’s at least equally menacing if journalists with the loudest claim to authoritative credibility are using that platform constantly to entrench falsehoods in the public’s mind.

The post Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That Are False appeared first on The Intercept.

There should be nothing whatsoever surprising about any of this, as it is the logical and necessary outcome of the self-serving template of immunity which D.C. elites have erected for themselves. The Bush administration was filled with high-level officials who did not just lie from podiums, but did so in service of actual war crimes. They invaded and destroyed a country of 26 million people based on blatant falsehoods and relentless propaganda. They instituted a worldwide torture regime by issuing decrees that purported to redefine what that term meant. They spied on the communications of American citizens without the warrants required by law. They kidnapped innocent people from foreign soil and sent them to be tortured in the dungeons of the world’s worst regimes, and rounded up Muslims on domestic soil with no charges. They imprisoned Muslim journalists for years without a whiff of due process. And they generally embraced and implemented the fundamental tenets of authoritarianism by explicitly positioning the president and his White House above the law.

We’re supposed to all forget about that, or at least agree to minimize it, in service of this revisionist conceit that the United States has long been governed by noble, honorable, and decent people until Donald Trump defaced the sanctity of the Oval Office with his band of gauche miscreants and evil clowns. Many of the same people who, just a decade ago, were depicting Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Paul Wolfowitz — remember them? — as monsters of historic proportions are today propagating the mythology that Trump is desecrating what had always been sacred and benevolent American civic space.

Not only were all Bush officials fully immunized from the legal consequences of their crimes — in D.C., that’s a given — but they were also fully welcomed back into decent, elite society with breakneck speed, lavished with honors, rewards, lucrative jobs, and praise. Those same Bush officials responsible for the most horrific crimes are now beloved by many of the same circles that, today, are expressing such righteous rage that Spicer is allowed onto the Emmy stage and a classroom at Harvard.

The Sean Spicer of torture and the Iraq War, Ari Fleischer, is a regular CNN contributor and makes many millions of dollars on the speaking circuit and providing communications consulting advice to large corporations and sports teams. One of the most vocal proponents of torture, former Bush and Rumsfeld speechwriter Marc Thiessen, was hired as a columnist by the Washington Post shortly after his torture-advocating book was published, and he remains employed there.

John Yoo, author of the memos justifying torture and lawlessness, is on the faculty of Berkeley Law School, where he holds an endowed chair. Condoleezza Rice, who literally chaired the meetings inside the White House where torture was choreographed to the last detail and crusaded for the invasion of Iraq, is not only on the faculty of Stanford but serves on the boards of multiple Fortune 500 corporations and is virtually universally beloved.

Darth Cheney himself, after leaving the Bush administration, made millions from a book that he was able to promote by being welcomed onto all major television networks, where he was treated like a wise, old statesman. When a marble bust of him was unveiled at the Capitol, Joe Biden — whose administration had previously immunized Bush officials from prosecution for war crimes — attended to pay homage and heap praise on his predecessor, gushing: “I actually like Dick Cheney.”

The rehabilitation of George W. Bush has been as widespread as it has been nauseating, culminating with a recent appearance on the talk show of liberal icon Ellen DeGeneres, who hugged him, hailed him as a personal friend, invited him to denounce Trump for sullying the office which Bush served with such honor, and then posted warm and loving pictures of the pair to her 48 million followers on Instagram.

Hillary Clinton, in her new book, fondly recalls how “George [W. Bush] actually called just minutes after I finished my concession speech, and graciously waited on the line while I hugged my team and supporters one last time. When we talked, he suggested we find time to get burgers together.” She added: “I think that’s Texan for ‘I feel your pain.'” We’ve put all that Iraq War, torture, and rendition unpleasantness behind us — just some good-faith policy disputes — and now see him as a nice, kind, decent, and honorable statesman.

In a recent interview with Vulture, the weekend MSNBC host Joy Reid, a former Obama campaign aide, gushed about the favorable views she now holds about, and the alignments she has now formed with, the Bush-era neocons who helped justify and usher in some of the most repugnant abuses and war crimes in American history:

Vulture: On the flip side, it has to be a bit heartening that some conservatives who used to be sort of MSNBC “villains” are now on your network trashing a Republican president.

Reid: One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together. [Laughs.]

So if initiating an aggressive war (which the Nuremberg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime”), instituting an international torture regime (which Ronald Reagan called “an abhorrent practice” that no circumstance can justify), and embracing the full model of presidential lawlessness does not result in ostracization, sanction, or exclusion from polite society, why on earth would anyone expect that Sean Spicer would face any sort of actual recrimination or consequence?

If you’re someone who employs David Frum or hires Ari Fleischer or treats Bush-era war criminals as respectable and honored sources, you really have no standing to object to the paradigm that has ushered Spicer into the halls of elite power. This is the precedent of elite immunity that has been created, often by the same people who are now so upset that Sean Spicer and his fellow Trump functionaries are the beneficiaries of the framework they helped to install.

The post Sean Spicer Is Honored Because — As Bush Officials Have Shown — D.C. Elites Always Thrive appeared first on The Intercept.

An hourlong interview she sat for with Vox’s Ezra Klein is particularly worthwhile. Clinton, for good reason, harbors a great deal of affection for Klein, which she expressed on multiple occasions during their chat. But Klein nonetheless pressed her on a series of criticisms that have been voiced about her and the Democrats’ stunted political approach, banal policies, status-quo-perpetuating worldview, and cramped aspirations that seem far more plausible as authors of her defeat than the familiar array of villains — Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, Jill Stein, Jim Comey, the New York Times — that she and her most ardent supporters are eager to blame.

Despite being illuminating, Klein’s discussion with Clinton contains a glaring though quite common omission: There is not a word about the role of foreign policy and endless war during the entire hour. While some of this may be attributable to Klein’s perfectly valid journalistic focus on domestic policies, such as health care, a huge factor in Clinton’s political career and how she is perceived — as a senator and especially as secretary of state — is her advocacy of multiple wars and other military actions, many, if not all, of which were rather disastrous, rendering it quite strange to spend an hour discussing why she lost without so much as mentioning any of that.

This is not so much a critique of Klein’s specific interview (which, again, is worthwhile) as it is reflective of the broader Democratic Party desire to pretend that the foreign wars it has repeatedly prosecuted, and the endless killing of innocent people for which it is responsible, do not exist. Part of that is the discomfort of cognitive dissonance: the Democratic branding and self-glorification as enemies of privilege, racism, and violence are directly in conflict with the party’s long-standing eagerness to ignore, or even actively support, policies which kill large numbers of innocent people from Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia to Yemen, Iraq, and Gaza, but which receive scant attention because of the nationality, ethnicity, poverty, distance, and general invisibility of their victims.

But a major part of this minimization is a misperception of the domestic political importance of these policies. From the beginning of his candidacy through the general election, Donald Trump rhetorically positioned himself as a vehement opponent of endless war, inveighing against both parties when doing so.

Though there is now a revisionist effort underway to falsely depict those who pointed this out as being gullible believers in Trump’s dovish and antiwar credentials, the reality is that most of us who warned of the efficacy of Trump’s antiwar campaign theme made explicitly clear that there was no reason to believe Trump would actually be dovish if he were elected. Indeed, from Trump’s history of endorsing the wars he was denouncing to his calls for greater and more savage bombing to his desire to nullify the Iran deal, there was ample reasons to doubt that he would usher in dovishness of any kind. But the point was that Trump’s antiwar posturing was a politically potent approach because of how unpopular endless war and militarism have become:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/717349622826549249

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/717347431457931264

These warnings — about the efficacy of Trump’s attacks on America’s bipartisan posture of Endless War — largely fell on deaf ears. Clinton continued to defend the virtues of her record of militarism, and even now, those topics are excluded almost completely from discussions of why Clinton lost.

What makes this exclusion particularly notable is that empirical data suggests that questions of endless war and militarism played a big, if not decisive, role in the outcome of the 2016 election. A study published earlier this year by Boston University political science professor Douglas Kriner and Minnesota Law School’s Francis Shen makes the case quite compellingly.

The paper notes that Trump did not run as any kind of pacifist but rather as someone who “promised a foreign policy that would be both simultaneously more muscular and more restrained,” yet “promised to be much more reticent” in committing the U.S. to new, foreign military adventures. The scholars argue that not only military families but Americans generally have grown increasingly hostile to these policies:

In one sense, all Americans have been affected by fifteen years of nearly continuous war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans of all stripes have watched each conflict’s developments unfold through extensive media coverage, movies, and personal stories from veterans returning from combat. Indeed, so great are its posited effects on American society that some analysts have proclaimed the emergence of an “Iraq Syndrome,” echoing the public skepticism about the efficacy of the use of force and the growing popular reluctance to employ it that emerged after Vietnam.

Clinton was uniquely ill-suited to channel this widespread sentiment given that she has vocally supported almost every proposed U.S. war and military intervention over the last 20 years (including ones Obama rejected in places such as Syria and Ukraine and, of course, Iraq). For that reason, she was one of the leading symbols of war and militarism, perhaps its most potent one, and Trump — however deceitful and cynical it might have been — positioned himself as her opposite.

From these premises, the authors argue that had the U.S. fought fewer wars, or at least experienced fewer casualties, Clinton would have won those three states and thus won the election:

One need not uncritically accept this maximalist conclusion to acknowledge the vital point: Clinton specifically and Democrats generally are perceived, with good reason, to be proponents of endless war policies that critical constituencies now despise. From a policy perspective, endless war and militarism shape virtually every key issue, from budgetary priorities and tax policy to corporatism and lobbyist power, making it inexcusable on the merits to ignore or downplay them. But also as a political matter, any discussion of why Clinton lost, or what the Democrats must reform, is woefully incomplete if it excludes these questions.

The post The Clinton Book Tour Is Largely Ignoring the Vital Role of Endless War in the 2016 Election Result appeared first on The Intercept.

The man, who was born Maurice Woodside but now goes by the name “Michael the Black Man,” was seated in the second row of the bleachers behind the podium, where he could be seen on television throughout Trump’s address.

While being broadcast live on camera, President Trump claims media cameras are being turned off https://t.co/cf0mASESyI

— CNN (@CNN) August 23, 2017

Although it is unclear if he traveled cross-country from his home in Miami on his own initiative, Woodside told a radio station in Chicago that he “wasn’t placed there.” He did, however, play a key role in the spectacle, roaring with approval as the president blamed the media for casting him as a racist after his remarks in defense of white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend.

If Trump’s staff did play a role in securing a spot for Woodside at center-stage, however, they seem to have overlooked the fact that he holds some very bizarre beliefs about race, including a theory that the Senate is controlled by a secret underground of “Cherokee Mormons.”

That idea, and a number of other confounding claims based on highly eccentric readings of scripture that point to a global race war, are developed at length in rambling, anti-Semitic sermons Woodside has posted on YouTube and Facebook and collected on the two websites displayed on his sign and T-shirt: BlacksforTrump2020.com and Gods2.com. His sign at Trump’s rally directed viewers to the former site.

While it is difficult to follow the logic of most of his rants, a Facebook post from last October, explaining his opposition to Hillary Clinton in apocalyptic terms, gives a taste of his arguments. “Semiramis mother of Nimrod was a White as Snow Canaanite who’s NickName is ISIS passed to Hagar to Nefitiri [sic] to Delilah to Jezebel to Mary Magdalene & the Illuminati has passed it to HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON,” Woodside wrote on Facebook on Oct. 27, two days after Trump praised him at a rally in Florida. Clinton, he added, is “the Great Red (White as Snow see through skin to the Red Bloody Mucle [sic]) Dragon who wants to Kill Sarah the Black Woman of America Rev.12:1-12.”

A post on Woodside’s website last year outlined what he called an international plot to spark a race war. “Arabs & East Indians have stolen America,” Woodside wrote, “& Plots to use Islam & ISIS TO KILL all Black Women of America, all White People & the Police by them causing a RACE War.”

Woodside’s recent obsession seems to be with the idea that the Bible contains coded warnings of a plot by secret Cherokees, Masons, and “shape shifters” to enslave Americans and defeat Trump. “Real KKK Slave Master Revealed & is the Cherokee!” Woodside wrote in one recent post with eccentric punctuation and references to scripture. “Black & White Americans are really Hebrews, (Hos.4:6) & were in America before Cherokees. Solve America’s Debt. make all Indians pay Taxes! Trick: we’re all mixed with them, we pay taxes they don’t & they Hate us, (r.36)!”

As The Intercept and other publications reported last year, he initially reinvented himself as a Republican activist in the 1990s, after the black supremacist cult leader he had followed throughout the previous decade, Yahweh ben Yahweh, was jailed for a series of killings that included the beheading of one victim. Woodside was eventually acquitted of playing any part in those murders, despite testimony from his brother, who had also been in the cult, implicating him in two killings.

When Woodside first attracted national attention for appearing at Trump rallies in Florida last October, and became a hero to conservative activists, Trump supporters argued that campaigns were not responsible for screening attendees, and pointed to the fact that the father of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, was spotted behind Clinton at one of her rallies.

Getting down with the Blacks for @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/LOcmhf0Wsc

— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) May 6, 2017

Woodside’s previous membership in a violent cult, however, combined with his online rants about race wars with “secret Cherokee Mormons,” raises questions not just for the White House but also the Secret Service, which allowed him to be in close proximity to the president 10 months after his troubled history was first reported in the national press.

Top Photo: A radical preacher and former member of a violent cult who goes by the name “Michael the Black Man,” stood behind President Donald Trump at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday.

The post Man Waving “Blacks for Trump” Sign at President’s Rally has Bizarre Beliefs about Race War appeared first on The Intercept.

Witnesses to the late-night operation, which was completed by 5:30 a.m. local time, shared images and video of workers removing the statues, including a massive one of Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Baltimore’s Wyman Park Dell.

My @wbalradio @BryanNehman video of Lee/Jackson Confederacy-era statue being removed from Balt's Wyman Park @ 3:15a w/ @MayorPugh50 watching pic.twitter.com/aY9gL540Lz

— Scott Wykoff (@ScottWykoffWBAL) August 16, 2017

A couple horses' asses. Bye bye. pic.twitter.com/uZtndhs04r

— baynardwoods (@baynardwoods) August 16, 2017

Baltimore’s mayor, Catherine Pugh, was spotted overseeing the operation just before 3 a.m. by Alec MacGillis, a Pro Publica reporter.

Baltimore mayor Cathy Pugh steps out of SUV to watch as crane prepares to lift Confederate monument in dead of night. pic.twitter.com/AN6vQRrFRt

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) August 16, 2017

Trump accomplishment: the removal of Jackson and Lee after nearly 70 years in Baltimore. pic.twitter.com/MkIDRAxZzq

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) August 16, 2017

Pugh told The Baltimore Sun that her decision to act quickly was partly an effort to avoid the kind of violence sparked by neo-Nazi protests in Charlottesville, where an antiracist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist.

A mayoral commission appointed by Pugh’s predecessor had recommended last year that the statues of Lee and Jackson be removed, along with a monument to Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the notorious Dred Scott decision in 1857, ruling that African-Americans could not be American citizens.

Both of those monuments were removed overnight, along with one dedicated to Confederate women and another honoring Confederate soldiers and sailors, which had been doused in blood-red paint over the weekend.

JUST IN— Baltimore removes Confederate-era statues overnight, including this one of Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney. (via @FlyingDogMK) pic.twitter.com/ndNw6QkgMW

— Splinter (@splinter_news) August 16, 2017

Taney monument gone pic.twitter.com/wJFY53sPxj

— baynardwoods (@baynardwoods) August 16, 2017

Confederate monuments removed from their bases, loaded onto flat bed trucks in Baltimore overnight. https://t.co/Q29hfYD7IW pic.twitter.com/guuekSQ3b6

— Sean Welsh (@SeanJWelsh) August 16, 2017

Baltimore's Confederate monuments removed overnight: https://t.co/p2BNI1vmlY Here's how the Confederate Soldiers + Sailors looked 12 hrs ago pic.twitter.com/AR1MaoNOE0

— lori todd (they/them) ???? ?? (@loritodd) August 16, 2017

Pugh acted after activists had vowed to destroy the monuments if the city delayed any longer.

Officials in Durham County, North Carolina, were less inclined to share the viewpoint of antiracist protesters, arresting a 22-year-old woman accused of helping to topple a Confederate statue there, and charging her with rioting and vandalism.

#BREAKING Protesters in #Durham topple confederate monument downtown pic.twitter.com/a3BNIavyxC

— Derrick Lewis (@DerrickLewisTV) August 14, 2017

Trump’s intemperate defense of the white supremacists at a news conference in Trump Tower on Tuesday was widely condemned, but seemed to delight his neo-Nazi supporters, including David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” to rebrand white supremacy.

Trump "They had a permit, the other group didn't have a permit"

Yes, white supremacy and slave owners had legal permission too

— Karen Attiah (@KarenAttiah) August 15, 2017

"Very fine people" "…you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists." -Donald Trump https://t.co/tAW5gWzzZ9

— Mathieu von Rohr (@mathieuvonrohr) August 16, 2017

When someone shows you who they are, you believe them. Trump is again letting white supremacists off the hook for #Charlottesville violence.

— U.S. Senator Al Franken (@SenFranken) August 15, 2017

https://twitter.com/DrDavidDuke/status/897559892164304896

I'm proud of him for speaking the truth.

— Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) August 15, 2017

Trump’s latest defense of white supremacists reminded many close observers of his career that his father, Fred Trump, was reportedly arrested at a KKK rally in Queens in 1927.

https://twitter.com/xeni/status/897627421758955520

Top photo: Workers removed a monument to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from Wyman Park in Baltimore early Wednesday morning.

The post As Trump Adds Fuel to the Fire, Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues in Dead of Night appeared first on The Intercept.

Whatever else there is to say about Trump, it is simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions, lining up with remarkable fervor behind his Democratic opponent. Top CIA officials openly declared war on Trump in the nation’s op-ed pages and one of their operatives (now an MSNBC favorite) was tasked with stopping him in Utah, while Time magazine reported, just a week before the election, that “the banking industry has supported Clinton with buckets of cash. … What bankers most like about Clinton is that she is not Donald Trump.”

Some of Trump’s advocated assaults on D.C. orthodoxy aligned with long-standing views of at least some left-wing factions (e.g., his professed opposition to regime change war in Syria, Iraq/Libya-style interventions, global free trade deals, entitlement cuts, greater conflict with Russia, and self-destructive pro-Israel fanaticism), while other Trump positions were horrifying to anyone with a plausible claim to leftism, or basic decency (reaffirming torture, expanding GITMO, killing terrorists’ families, launching Islamophobic crusades, fixation on increasing hostility with Tehran, further unleashing federal and local police forces). Ironically, Trump’s principal policy deviation around which elites have now coalesced in opposition — a desire for better relations with Moscow — was the same one that Obama, to their great bipartisan dismay, also adopted (as evidenced by Obama’s refusal to more aggressively confront the Kremlin-backed Syrian government or arm anti-Russian factions in Ukraine).

It is true that Trump, being Trump, was wildly inconsistent in virtually all of these pronouncements, often contradicting or abandoning them weeks after he made them. And, as many of us pointed out at the time, it was foolish to assume that the campaign vows of any politician, let alone an adept con man like Trump, would be a reliable barometer for what he would do once in office. And, as expected, he has betrayed many of these promises within months of being inaugurated, while the very Wall Street interests he railed against have found a very welcoming embrace in the Oval Office.

Nonetheless, Trump, as a matter of rhetoric, repeatedly affirmed policy positions that were directly contrary to long-standing bipartisan orthodoxy, and his policy and personal instability only compounded elites’ fears that he could not be relied upon to safeguard their lucrative, power-vesting agenda. In so many ways — due to his campaign positions, his outsider status, his unstable personality, his witting and unwitting unmasking of the truth of U.S. hegemony, the embarrassment he causes in Western capitals, his reckless unpredictability — Trump posed a threat to their power centers.

It is often claimed that this trans-partisan, elite coalition assembled against Trump because they are simply American patriots horrified by the threat he poses to America’s noble traditions and institutions. I guess if you want to believe that the CIA, the GOP consulting class, and assorted D.C. imperialists, along with Bush-era neocons like Bill Kristol and David Frum, woke up one day and developed some sort of earnest, patriotic conscience about democracy, ethics, constitutional limits, and basic decency, you’re free to believe that. It makes for a nice, moving story: a film from the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” genre. But at the very least, Trump’s campaign assaults on their most sacred pieties was, and remains, a major factor in their seething contempt for him.

From the start of Trump’s presidency, it was clear that the permanent national security power structure in Washington was deeply hostile to his presidency and would do what it could to undermine it. Shortly before Trump was inaugurated, I wrote an article noting that many of the most damaging anti-Trump leaks were emanating from anonymous CIA and other Deep State operatives who despised Trump because the policies he vowed to enact — the ones American voters ratified — were so contrary to their agenda and belief system. Indeed, they were even anonymously boasting that they were withholding secrets from Trump’s briefings because they decided the elected president should not have access to them.

After Trump openly questioned the reliability of the CIA in light of its Iraq War failures, Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow’s show to warn Trump — explicitly — that he would be destroyed if he continued to oppose the intelligence community:

Chuck Schumer on Trump's tweet hitting intel community: "He's being really dumb to do this." https://t.co/MOcU8ruOPK

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 4, 2017

Although it is now common to assert — as a form of in-the-know mockery — that the notion of a “Deep State” in the U.S. was invented by Trump supporters only in the last year, the reality is that the U.S. Deep State has been reported on and openly discussed in numerous circles long before Trump. In 2010, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Dana Priest, along with Bill Arkin, published a three-part series that the paper titled “Top Secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control.”

In 2014, mainstream national security journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady published a book titled “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry,” which documented — in its own words — that “there is a hidden country within the United States,” one “formed from the astonishing number of secrets held by the government and the growing ranks of secret-keepers given charge over them.”

Other journalists such as Peter Dale Scott and Mike Lofgren have long written about the U.S. Deep State completely independent of Trump. The belief that the “Deep State” was invented by Trump supporters as some recent conspiratorial concoction is based in pure ignorance about national security discourse, or a jingoistic desire to believe that the U.S. (unlike primitive, inferior countries) is immune from such malevolent forces, or both.

Indeed, mainstream liberals in good standing, such as the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, have repeatedly and explicitly speculated about (and, in Heer’s case, warned of) the possibility of Deep State subversion of the White House:

The terrifying thing here is the only people able to stand up to Trump so far are the denizens of the Deep State. Also the Chinese gov't.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 14, 2017

The American Deep State is in open conflict with an incoming president who is twitchy, thin-skinned & paranoid. What could go wrong?

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) January 11, 2017

For me, the most terrifying thing about this political moment is the intervention of the Deep State (against both Clinton & Trump) https://t.co/qBnyH47W6z

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) January 12, 2017

Call it what you will — the National Security Elite, the Deep State, the Blob. It's very pig-headed & knows how to sabotage change.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) April 17, 2017

To qualify earlier tweet, there's a lot Deep State can do short of a coup: leaking and investigation. That's all to the good.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 12, 2017

That the U.S. has a shadowy, secretive world of intelligence and military operatives who exercise great power outside of elections and democratic accountability is not some exotic, alt-right conspiracy theory; it’s utterly elemental to understanding anything about how Washington works. It’s hard to believe that anyone on this side of a sixth grade civics class would seek to deny that.

The last several weeks have ushered in more open acknowledgment of — and cheerleading for — a subversion of Trump’s agenda by unelected military and intelligence officials. Media accounts have been almost unanimous in heralding the arrival of retired Marine Gen. John Kelly as White House chief of staff (pictured, top photo), widely depicted as a sign that normalcy is returning to the executive branch. “John Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose Military Discipline on White House,” the New York Times headline announced.

The current storyline is that Kelly has aligned with Trump’s national security adviser, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, to bring seriousness and order to the White House. In particular, these two military men are systematically weakening and eliminating many of the White House officials who are true adherents to the domestic and foreign policy worldview on which Trump’s campaign was based. These two military officials (along with yet another retired general, Defense Secretary James Mattis) have long been hailed by anti-Trump factions as the Serious, Responsible Adults in the Trump administration, primarily because they support militaristic policies — such as the war in Afghanistan and intervention in Syria — that are far more in line with official Washington’s bipartisan posture.

As the Atlantic’s Rosie Gray reports, McMaster has successfully fired several national security officials aligned with Steve Bannon and the nationalistic, purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy and anti-Muslim worldview Trump advocated throughout the election. As Gray notes, this has provoked anger among Trump supporters who view the assertion of power by these generals as an undemocratic attack against the policies for which the electorate voted. Gray writes: “McMaster’s show of force has set off alarm bells among Bannon allies in the pro-Trump media sphere, who favored Flynn and regard the national security adviser as a globalist interloper.”

In a bizarre yet illuminating reflection of rapidly shifting political alliances, Democratic Party think tanks and other groups have rallied behind McMaster as some sort of besieged, stalwart hero whose survival is critical to the Republic, notwithstanding the fact that, by all accounts, he is fighting to ensure the continuation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan and escalate it in Syria. As usually happens these days, these Democrats are in lockstep with their new neocon partners, led by Bill Kristol, who far prefer the unelected agenda of McMaster and Kelly to the one that Trump used to get elected:

The success or failure of the Bannon/alt-right/Russian assault on McMaster will be a key moment for the Trump Administration–& the country.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 4, 2017

It is certainly valid to point out that these generals didn’t use tanks or any other show of force to barge into the White House; they were invited there by Trump, who appointed them to these positions. And they only have the power that he agrees that they should exercise.

But there’s no denying that Trump is deluged by exactly the kinds of punishments that Schumer warned Trump would be imposed on him if he continued to defy the intelligence community. Many of Trump’s most devoted haters are, notably, GOP consultants; one of the most tenacious of that group, Rick Wilson, celebrated today in the Daily Beast that the threat of prosecution and the tidal waves of harmful leaks have forced Trump into submission. The combination of the “Goldman Boys” and the generals has taken over, Wilson crows, and is destroying the Bannon-led agenda on which Trump campaigned.

Whatever else is true, there is now simply no question that there is open warfare between adherents to the worldview Trump advocated in order to win, and the permanent national security power faction in Washington that — sometimes for good, and sometimes for evil — despises that agenda. The New Republic’s Brian Beutler described the situation perfectly on Friday:

Where the generals haven’t been empowered to run the show, they have asserted themselves nonetheless. “In the earliest weeks of Trump’s presidency,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday, Mattis and Kelly agreed “that one of them should remain in the United States at all times to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House.”

It would be sensationalizing things to call this a soft coup, but it is impossible to deny that real presidential powers have been diluted or usurped. Elected officials have decided that leaving the functioning of the government to unelected military officers is politically preferable to invoking constitutional remedies that would require them to vote.

Beutler is a full-scale, devoted enemy of Trump’s political agenda, and is clearly glad that something is impeding it. But he also recognizes the serious, enduring dangers to democracy from relying on military officials and intelligence operatives to serve as some sort of backstop, or supreme guardians, of political values and norms.

It’s particularly ironic that many of the same people who have spent the year ridiculing the notion that the U.S. has any kind of Deep State are now trumpeting the need for the U.S. military to save the Republic from the elected government, given that this, roughly speaking, is the defining attribute of all Deep States, at least as they depict themselves.

There have been some solitary Democratic Party voices expressing concern about these developments. Here, for instance, is what Barbara Lee had to say as most of her fellow Democrats were cheering the arrival of Gen. Kelly in the West Wing:

By putting Gen John Kelly in charge, Pres Trump is militarizing the White House & putting our executive branch in the hands of an extremist.

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 28, 2017

But hers was clearly the minority view: The military triumvirate of Kelly, Mattis, and McMaster has been cast as the noble defender of American democracy, pitted against those who were actually elected to lead the government.

No matter how much of a threat one regards Trump as being, there really are other major threats to U.S. democracy and important political values. It’s hard, for instance, to imagine any group that has done more harm, and ushered in more evil, than the Bush-era neocons with whom Democrats are now openly aligning. And who has brought more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world over the last six decades than the U.S. national security state?

In terms of some of the popular terms that are often thrown around these days — such as “authoritarianism” and “democratic norms” and “U.S. traditions” — it’s hard to imagine many things that would pose a greater threat to all of that than empowering the national security state (what, before Trump, has long been called the Deep State) to exert precisely the power that is supposed to be reserved exclusively for elected officials. In sum, Trump opponents should be careful of what they wish for, as it might come true.

The post What’s Worse: Trump’s Campaign Agenda or Empowering Generals and CIA Operatives to Subvert It? appeared first on The Intercept.

Specifically, the president complained about sections 253 and 257 of the legislation, which state that the United States “does not recognize territorial changes effected by force,” and will “never recognize the illegal annexation of Crimea by the Government of the Russian Federation or the separation of any portion of Ukrainian territory through the use of military force.”

Since those statements simply reiterate nine decades of U.S. policy about not recognizing borders changed by force — which has been in effect since the Hoover Administration and was restated by Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday — Trump’s objection to it seems to indicate that he is open to negotiating new borders for Ukraine as part of his stated desire to “make a deal with Russia.” What, if anything, Trump would get from Russia, in exchange for lifting sanctions related to its occupation of Crimea and support for separatist rebels in the east, remains unclear.

In fact, the White House’s own explanation of the legal basis for Trump’s objection to those sections of the law includes a clue that the president might be willing to let Russia keep Crimea. The problem with sections 253 and 257, Trump says in the signing statement, is that “those provisions purport to displace the President’s exclusive constitutional authority to recognize foreign governments, including their territorial bounds, in conflict with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Zivotofsky v. Kerry.”

To decode that, it is important to know that in the Zivotofsky case, decided in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not force the Obama Administration to accept Israel’s unilateral annexation of Jerusalem, which was seized by force in 1967. Every American presidents since Harry Truman has insisted that legal sovereignty over Jerusalem, which is claimed by both Israel and Palestine, can only be settled in final status negotiations.

The American parents of Menachem Zivotofsky, who was born in Jerusalem in 2002, had sued the State Department in 2003 to obtain a passport for their son which would state that his place of birth was in Israel, in accordance with a law passed by Congress that same year. President George W. Bush signed that bill just before Menachem was born, but issued a signing statement making it clear that he would not obey the law, arguing that it “impermissibly interferes with the president’s constitutional authority to conduct the nation’s foreign affairs.”

While Trump has so far maintained that official ambiguity over Jerusalem’s status by not acting on his campaign promise to move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv, the fact that he brought up that case in relation to a part of the sanctions law barring him from recognizing any change to Ukraine’s borders strongly suggests that he sees the sovereignty of Crimea a potential subject of negotiation with Russia.

In light of this clue as to Trump’s intentions, it is worth keeping in mind that just last week he suggested on Twitter that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, should investigate “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign.”

Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign – "quietly working to boost Clinton." So where is the investigation A.G. @seanhannity

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2017

The president’s tweeted allegation of an illegal conspiracy against him was based on a Politico report that, in 2016, a Ukrainian-American operative working for the Democratic National Committee had “met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia.”

Papering over the Russian annexation of Crimea, by persuading Ukraine to agree to lease it to Russia, was also a central part of a secret plan for a peace deal reportedly presented to Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, in January. That proposal, which was brought to the White House by Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, also included a plan to force Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, from office by revealing supposedly compromising information. The plan was presented to Cohen by Felix Sater, one of Trump’s Russian-American business associates, and Andrii Artemenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker from the pro-Russia party once advised by Manafort.

While the war in Ukraine is out of the headlines in the U.S. these days, an incident on Russian state television on Wednesday was a reminder that it still arouses considerable passions in Russia.

You think your workday was bad? Check out this Russian TV reporter who was sent to cover the Paratroopers' Day celebrations in Moscow… pic.twitter.com/sIXgffLnMw

— Coda Story (@CodaStory) August 2, 2017

Top Photo: During the Russian operation to seize Crimea, armed soldiers without identifying insignia were stationed outside a Ukrainian military base near the city of Simferopol on March 17, 2014.

The post Trump’s Objections to Russia Sanctions Law Suggest He Might Trade Crimea Away appeared first on The Intercept.