Quotes of the Day:
"The Revolution... was the result of a mature and reflecting preference for freedom, and not of a vague or ill-defined craving for independence."
- Alexis De Tocqueville
“A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.”
- Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever. ”
- George Orwell, 1984
1. Don’t Buy the Xi-Putin Hype
2. The Army is Full of Inspired and Innovative Thinkers—It Just Needs a Way to Leverage Them
3. Would Russians Embrace War?
4. McConnell Says RNC Shouldn’t Have Censured Cheney and Kinzinger
5. The War on Free Speech
6. Air Force ordered to pay $230 million to Texas church shooting survivors, families of victims
7. Iran Is ‘No. 1 Destabilizing’ Threat In Middle East, CENTCOM Nominee Says
8. The hacked account and suspicious donations behind the Canadian trucker protests
9. Duterte's Growing Overseas Troubles
10. Spy world wary as Biden team keeps leaking Russia intel
11. Air Force Fought Families of Texas Church Shooting Victims 'Tooth and Nail,' Lawyer Says
12. ‘Hand of Russia’ visible in African coups says AFRICOM boss
13. Biden’s pick to lead military in Middle East says U.S. has a ‘moral obligation’ to help Afghans left behind
14. Pro-China Twitter Accounts Flood Hashtag Critical of Beijing Winter Olympics
15. Biden Picks Replacements for Purged Naval Academy Board -- Including 2 Trailblazing Women
16. Foreign reporters amazed by China’s efforts in holding Games amid pandemic, thoughtful arrangements for their work
17. Biden to appoint son of late Sen. John McCain to Naval Academy board
18. FDD | China, Russia, and Iran Hold Trilateral Naval Drill
19. Germany must implement its ban of Hezbollah terror activities
20. Heritage Foundation, former powerhouse of GOP policy, adjusts in face of new competition from Trump allies
21. Erik Prince Helped Raise Money for Conservative Spy Venture
22. Biden's Syria strike is an important win — but underscores the folly of leaving Afghanistan
23. N. Korea increases virus budget after partial border opening
24. Terrorists, U.S. forces and a brutal dictator: Whatever happened to Syria?
25. South Korea’s Nuclear Future is a New Election Battleground
1. Don’t Buy the Xi-Putin Hype
Excerpts:
The emerging clash between China’s growing economic dependence on Europe and closer relations with Russia, especially as Putin becomes more aggressive in his relations with the West, gives Washington and its European allies some much-needed leverage. They should play on this divergence in Russian and Chinese interests by openly rebuking China—both for interfering in NATO affairs and for supporting Russian aggression in Europe. European countries should warn they will reevaluate economic collaboration with China, including their commitments to the Belt and Road Initiative, unless Beijing immediately reverses course.
For its part, Washington should make clear to Beijing that the U.S. Treasury Department will crack down hard on any Chinese entities that help Russia circumvent the sanctions that Washington will impose if Moscow once again attacks Ukraine. These efforts could highlight cracks in the Chinese-Russian alliance, make sure that Putin remains on his own regarding Ukraine, and signal to China that there are limits to its malign influence in Europe. All that was made apparent by the rather underwhelming Xi-Putin summit last week.
Don’t Buy the Xi-Putin Hype
An expert's point of view on a current event.
Beijing went out of its way to downplay the summit's significance, revealing a potential wedge for the West.
By Craig Singleton, a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former U.S. diplomat.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping pose for photographers during their meeting in Beijing on Feb. 4. ALEXEI DRUZHININ/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images
When Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met before the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Olympics last Friday, it was their first face-to-face meeting in almost two years. Amid the standoff between Russia and the West over Putin’s apparent preparations to invade Ukraine, observers watched closely for signs that the two leaders would intensify their so-called axis of authoritarianism—what many have described as a nascent alliance of two revisionist, anti-Western powers. Expectations varied from Chinese economic support that would help Russia withstand Western sanctions should it invade Ukraine to joint statements on Taiwan, signaling a possible, albeit unlikely, two-front conflict that could see China move against the island nation at the same time.
But if you look a little closer at China’s readout from the summit, it becomes apparent that Putin left Beijing without having accomplished much at all. Sure, Russia and China announced a 30-year energy deal to deliver natural gas from Russia’s Far East to northeastern China, but it will be years before a proposed new pipeline becomes fully operational. Regarding Ukraine, a joint statement included a brief mention of support for Putin’s demands for new security guarantees from NATO.
But the summit also showed that Xi remains constrained by forces outside of his control. While offering his fellow autocrat some support, Xi does not want to risk damaging China’s already strained relations with Europe, particularly given growing concerns about China’s rapid economic slowdown. China’s exports to the European Union and Britain combined are almost 10 times those to Russia. With growing restrictions on technology transfers and Chinese investments as well as loud calls to reduce supply chain dependency on China, the last thing Xi wants is for China’s economy to face possible post-invasion sanctions should his support for Putin be too overt.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met before the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Olympics last Friday, it was their first face-to-face meeting in almost two years. Amid the standoff between Russia and the West over Putin’s apparent preparations to invade Ukraine, observers watched closely for signs that the two leaders would intensify their so-called axis of authoritarianism—what many have described as a nascent alliance of two revisionist, anti-Western powers. Expectations varied from Chinese economic support that would help Russia withstand Western sanctions should it invade Ukraine to joint statements on Taiwan, signaling a possible, albeit unlikely, two-front conflict that could see China move against the island nation at the same time.
But if you look a little closer at China’s readout from the summit, it becomes apparent that Putin left Beijing without having accomplished much at all. Sure, Russia and China announced a 30-year energy deal to deliver natural gas from Russia’s Far East to northeastern China, but it will be years before a proposed new pipeline becomes fully operational. Regarding Ukraine, a joint statement included a brief mention of support for Putin’s demands for new security guarantees from NATO.
But the summit also showed that Xi remains constrained by forces outside of his control. While offering his fellow autocrat some support, Xi does not want to risk damaging China’s already strained relations with Europe, particularly given growing concerns about China’s rapid economic slowdown. China’s exports to the European Union and Britain combined are almost 10 times those to Russia. With growing restrictions on technology transfers and Chinese investments as well as loud calls to reduce supply chain dependency on China, the last thing Xi wants is for China’s economy to face possible post-invasion sanctions should his support for Putin be too overt.
And therein lies an opportunity for the United States and its European partners to exploit the Sino-Russian relationship’s frictions—for example, by threatening to target China’s economic interests in Europe unless Beijing immediately dials back its support for Russia’s belligerence.
It should be abundantly clear: This is not how government news services celebrate a strategic partnership.
Although Xi and Putin are sometimes described as representing two sides of the same authoritarian coin, there are clear limits to the top-down relationship that has developed between their two countries. Even as Beijing and Moscow coordinate votes in the United Nations Security Council, build the Shanghai Cooperation Organization into a regional bloc, hold a growing number of joint military exercises, and complete major arms deals, this has not yet translated into deeper economic or societal linkages between China and Russia. In other words, compared to Western alliances, their cooperation often looks transactional and opportunistic—and that did not change last week.
The relationship is very uneven: Russia depends far more on China than the other way around. Sure, China is staring down ever-growing energy demands amid widespread shortages, but Russia is even more desperate to find new customers for its oil and gas. In both Beijing and Moscow, some elites have expressed reservations about imbalances in the partnership. Chinese commentators, in particular, have pointed to the risk of alienating European business partners, whose economic importance to China’s development is immeasurably greater than that of Russian commodity suppliers.
The summit’s stakes could not have been higher for Xi. As Beijing remains laser-focused on avoiding negative media coverage of the 2022 Winter Olympics, Xi has absolutely no desire for Putin to pull him into a faraway conflict. Bad enough that Beijing has had to endure a raft of negative publicity about its atrocities against Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans as well as recent economic data revealing serious cracks in China’s economic model—which suddenly makes China’s rise look a lot less inevitable.
This explains why Beijing went out of its way to downplay the significance of the Xi-Putin meeting. One needs to look no further than the statements issued by both countries at the summit’s conclusion and how differently they were covered by their respective governments. Take the much-reported comment on NATO in the two leaders’ joint statement: a single sentence buried in the 28th paragraph. It noted that both countries oppose the “continued expansion of NATO” and believe that NATO should “abandon the ideology of the Cold War”—a weak, boilerplate statement considering Putin’s much more extreme demands, including that NATO roll back its commitments even to existing members.
More significantly, NATO and Ukraine were absent from the Chinese foreign ministry’s post-summit readout as well as from coverage of the summit by Xinhua, China’s official state press agency. China’s version of the joint statement reiterates that China “understands” and “supports” the proposals put forward by Russia to create long-term, legally binding security guarantees in Europe, but it otherwise steers clear of the current standoff over Ukraine. What’s more, mere hours after the summit, Xinhua’s homepage was quickly overtaken by news about the Olympics, with the summit relegated to a single news item among many. It should be abundantly clear: This is not how government news services celebrate a strategic partnership.
Beijing’s intentional reticence to downplay its support for Moscow’s grievances against NATO reflects more than a desire to prevent the Ukraine crisis from overshadowing the Olympics. For Xi, it comes down to dollars and common sense, namely his desire to avoid unnecessarily alienating his economic partners in Europe at a time when China’s economy is already on the ropes.
Relations between Beijing and Brussels have been in a downward spiral for more than two years. A proposed EU-China investment pact was indefinitely shelved last year amid rising European concerns about China’s deceptive, nonmarket economic practices as well as China’s systematic persecution of Uyghur Muslims. When China recently blocked most trade from NATO member state Lithuania after it deepened its ties with Taiwan, the EU quickly rallied to Vilnius’s defense, suing China for discriminatory trade practices at the World Trade Organization. In recent months, Xi has personally stepped in to try to soothe relations with Europe. The most obvious reason: China is banking on enhanced ties to help it weather the current economic storm—including with the 19 European NATO members that have signed onto Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative.
Moreover, Beijing’s muted support for Moscow’s diplomatic demands—whether one considers them reasonable or not—should not be misinterpreted as a blessing for war. A Russian attack on Ukraine and the sanctions backlash from the West would shock energy and other commodity markets as well as weigh heavily on global economic sentiment. With Beijing warning that economic stability remains the Chinese Communist Party’s top priority for 2022, a potential war in Europe could thus hasten China’s already rapid economic slowdown and make its highly optimistic growth targets even less attainable. That, in turn, would undermine Xi’s most important goal of all: his appointment for another five-year presidential term at this October’s Chinese Communist Party National Party Congress.
The emerging clash between China’s growing economic dependence on Europe and closer relations with Russia, especially as Putin becomes more aggressive in his relations with the West, gives Washington and its European allies some much-needed leverage. They should play on this divergence in Russian and Chinese interests by openly rebuking China—both for interfering in NATO affairs and for supporting Russian aggression in Europe. European countries should warn they will reevaluate economic collaboration with China, including their commitments to the Belt and Road Initiative, unless Beijing immediately reverses course.
For its part, Washington should make clear to Beijing that the U.S. Treasury Department will crack down hard on any Chinese entities that help Russia circumvent the sanctions that Washington will impose if Moscow once again attacks Ukraine. These efforts could highlight cracks in the Chinese-Russian alliance, make sure that Putin remains on his own regarding Ukraine, and signal to China that there are limits to its malign influence in Europe. All that was made apparent by the rather underwhelming Xi-Putin summit last week.
Craig Singleton is a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former U.S. diplomat. Twitter: @CraigMSingleton
2. The Army is Full of Inspired and Innovative Thinkers—It Just Needs a Way to Leverage Them
Our own soldiers - a key overlooked resource?
The Army is Full of Inspired and Innovative Thinkers—It Just Needs a Way to Leverage Them - Modern War Institute
During her year as a student at the Command and General Staff College, a US Army major spends her time deeply researching and writing a paper on the organizational impacts created by land-based strategic fires capabilities. She loves to write and has always been passionate about this particular subject. And for the first time in the past few years, she has the time to research and write. In conjunction with her research, she emails the Fires Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate’s organizational inbox, emails contacts in the Fires Center of Excellence, she asks questions at a fires-focused forum, and calls mentors for assistance. In the end, she receives little feedback, even less encouragement, and zero organizational support. Eventually, she abandons the project.
This is a fictional story, but its underlying themes will be familiar to far too many men and women in uniform. A deep interest in a particular subject and the desire to contribute to the intellectual advancement of the profession of arms flounder when met with a lack of institutional support and no defined avenue to be transformed into something useful to the Army. That needs to change.
With the advent of the Army Futures Command (AFC) in 2018, the Army has begun to make monumental strides in its ability to collaborate across industry, think tanks, academia, and Army organizations. We still, however, fall short in fostering collaboration among individuals within the force. Effectively seizing the whole of our intellectual capacity is critical to gaining and maintaining a cognitive edge across the entire DOTMLPF-P spectrum—doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy. The time has come for the Army to redefine the way it collaborates with individuals across the force. Specifically, the Army needs an institutional solution that:
- enables individuals the freedom to pursue their interests in strategic scholarship external to and within the limits of their current duty assignments—without derailing professional or personal timelines;
- enhances collaboration and facilitates nearly immediate feedback from the force on strategic issues;
- requires only a nominal investment of resources, time, and personnel to manage; and
- reinforces a culture of innovation and learning within the force.
The Problem
Existing programs and methods for collaboration are insufficient. Calls for papers are often ignored and written in vacuums, AFC’s “soldier touch points” are narrow and limited in scope, and senior leader forums and conferences are often unknown to the force as a whole or are not inclusive. Likewise, using organizational inbox emails as a collaboration tool is also ineffective because the inboxes are often unknown to individuals in the force and are sometimes neglected by the organizations that manage them. The Army lacks a robust, formalized system for collaboration that is inclusive of all uniformed personnel—regardless of duty assignment or location.
An Institutional Solution to Cultivate Innovation
To solve this institutional problem, the Army needs an institutional solution. The one I propose is a new program—a Strategic Collaboration Innovation Program (SCIP)—to provide a structure for effective collaboration between individuals across the force. The SCIP would produce immediate feedback from the force on strategic issues and would reinforce a culture of innovation and learning. The scholarship would span classification caveats and would contribute to professional bulletins, produce white papers, and assist in the revision of doctrine. Outside of published works, participation in various strategic war games, forums, and working groups could be facilitated and consultation on operational plans could be considered. The nature of collaboration would necessarily take different forms: senior members of the SCIP could mentor junior members, members could collaborate as part of a network on long-term projects or when ad hoc opportunities arise, and individuals could work alone on identified institutional priorities. The program would be limited only by the boundaries of its mission: to enable creative solutions to complex problem sets.
Figure 1: SCIP Concept
Establishing and maintaining the SCIP would require a nominal investment of resources to manage, but would provide vital communications structures to enhance collaboration across vested Army organizations, academia, and industry. Ideally, the SCIP’s size would be relatively small initially—fewer than one thousand servicemembers—with the flexibility to grow as interest and time permit. The program would most effectively be managed by a team within the Headquarters of the Department of the Army (HQDA) to enable effective management of the portfolios of individuals conducting research that spans the breadth and depth of strategic focus areas across Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), AFC, Forces Command (FORSCOM), and HQDA. As an additional benefit, the SCIP would help provide continuity across these organizations, many of which have a stake in researching and solving similar or related strategic problem sets.
The SCIP would also provide an effective instrument to help focus the research of its members with a “push-pull” application process to match strategic need with individual talents and interests. With input from TRADOC, FORSCOM, and AFC, the centralized application process would be managed by HQDA—with special emphasis on scholarship that falls within published strategic focus areas. In this process, individuals would be encouraged to apply for areas of scholarship by “pushing” their interests forward, while the Army can focus research areas by “pulling” for scholarship with a list of published strategic initiatives—like the Army’s campaign of learning objectives. Applications should be renewed for consideration annually to maximize talent and productivity within the group.
Collaboration would be enhanced by incentives for excellence in scholarship, as well as minimizing impediments for those within the SCIP. Balancing research, work, and life is difficult. An individual’s ability to research will vary throughout a career as he or she navigates key developmental assignments, training exercises, deployments, and life experiences. Therefore, high-quality scholarship should be rewarded, and contributing members of the SCIP should have their membership annotated on their Soldier Record Briefs and in personnel records. Further, the Army must take care not to disincentivize participation within the SCIP with inflexible timelines. The SCIP must provide its members some flexibility in the timelines for scholarship deliverables to account for fluctuations in professional and personal requirements.
Access to Information: Avoiding a Potential “Firewall” to Collaboration
For some research areas, the program would necessarily require access to classified information, classified networks, and a standardized information security program. While these and other requirements are beyond the scope of this article, the diverse information security needs of local installation tenants coupled with a SCIP participant’s research would require patience and flexibility—with the local installation’s mission requirements always taking priority (e.g., Secret Internet Protocol Router terminals are a finite resource that should be prioritized for mission requirements). The relatively small size and scope of the SCIP, however, would make the process manageable. Further, not every individual within the SCIP would require access to classified information to conduct research, further mitigating the demands on the program.
The SCIP would represent an important evolutionary step in the Army’s People First strategy. The program would leverage our people as the greatest asset in the Army, providing additional cognitive bandwidth and continuity to organizations like TRADOC, FORSCOM, and AFC. It would promote a culture of innovation and learning within the force, allow individuals to pursue their interests in strategic-level scholarship throughout their careers, and enable the Army’s mission by providing individual talent to the force at the time and place it adds the greatest value. Finally, because the program would require few resources to implement and maintain, the potential benefits far outweigh any costs associated with the program. With the ever-evolving threat landscape that the Army must be prepared for, the SCIP would be instrumental in leveraging talent to create a more lethal, future-oriented force.
Major Jeffrey E. Horn, Jr. is a field artillery officer with III Corps Joint Fires Cell. He commanded twice in the 101st Airborne Division Artillery at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and served his lieutenant time in the 3rd Cavalry Regiment at Fort Hood, Texas. He holds a bachelor of music from Southern Methodist University, a master of arts in security management from American Military University, and a master of operational studies from the Command and General Staff College.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Chad Menegay, US Army
3. Would Russians Embrace War?
Conclusion:
Whether or not this reality will have any effect on the Kremlin’s thinking is far from certain. Putin may well calculate that the benefits of reasserting Russian power outweigh any political costs. But if he does, he may not only push Ukrainians further away from Russia; he may also push Russians further away from the Kremlin.
Would Russians Embrace War?
Why an Attack on Ukraine Might Erode Putin’s Support
February 9, 2022
In a January 28 interview with the Russian media about the Ukraine crisis, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said, “if it depends on the Russian Federation, there will not be a war.” He also suggested that there were “kernels of rationality” in the formal responses to Russia’s demands that the United States and NATO had delivered a few days earlier. To some Western commentators, Lavrov’s comments were a hopeful sign that the Kremlin had achieved its intermediate aims and might be shifting course. According to this analysis, Russian President Vladimir Putin had the West exactly where he wanted it: by moving more than a hundred thousand troops to the Ukrainian border and issuing an ultimatum, he had forced the United States and NATO to enter into a dialogue with Moscow. All along, then, the Russian government had been acting with calculated brinksmanship, pursuing an approach that has left the United States and its NATO allies with few choices other than to negotiate on an equal footing.
For much of the Russian public, however, the Kremlin’s actions have looked very different. Amid widespread popular anxiety about the economy and the COVID-19 pandemic and growing fears of a large-scale war, the Russian government has seemingly raced headlong into an unnecessary and possibly reckless confrontation with the West. To Russian ears, even Lavrov’s recent conciliatory language has an unsettling ring. As the foreign minister continued, “We don’t want war, but we won’t allow anyone to trample on our interests or ignore them, either.” The words are familiar in Russia. According to the lyrics of “If Tomorrow Brings War,” a popular Soviet song from the World War II era, “We don’t want war, but we’ll defend ourselves / we’re rightfully strengthening our defense. / We’ll rout our enemy on hostile land / with little bloodshed and a mighty blow!” Shortly after the song seized the country’s imagination, the Soviet Union invaded Finland.
As with Finland in 1939, the Kremlin keeps saying it wants to avoid a conflict but seems to be doing everything it can to provoke one. There have been frequent rumors about Russian efforts to create a pretext for war, including one involving the faked video about an attack by Ukrainians on the civilian population of the Donbas that surfaced in early February. Such tactics are similar to what the Soviet leadership did when it provoked the war with Finland.
Amid weeks of analysis of Russia’s troop movements and Putin’s apparent motivations for the military buildup, there has been comparatively little attention given to what ordinary Russians think about the developments. Yet much can be learned from recent polling data. By many indications, Russians, including those who generally, if indifferently, support Putin, are deeply ambivalent about a conflict with Ukraine. Many fear severe economic consequences; given the role that Ukraine plays in Russian culture and history, some fear that a war would amount to Russia “fighting itself” (as the perestroika rock idol Boris Grebenshchikov put it in 1987). For Putin, who faces reelection in two years, these domestic anxieties are not insignificant. If Russia enters a protracted war in Ukraine, it could threaten the broad popular base on which Putin has relied for more than 20 years.
The Coming Economic Crisis
Outwardly, many Russians seem to support the Kremlin’s warlike stance toward the West. In the interview with Lavrov, Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia’s RT news network, passed on the question that her social media followers had been asking: “When are we going to hit Washington?” Although Simonyan’s own hawkish views have done much to stir up such questions, the Kremlin’s basic position about defending itself from Western encroachment has often seemed to find support. As one focus-group respondent to a recent opinion survey commented, “Russia will have to respond . . . We are being pinched from all sides; they’re biting us. What are we supposed to do? Give in?”
There is also a precedent for the Kremlin’s assertive foreign policies winning popular support at home. In 2014, following the annexation of Crimea, Putin’s public approval ratings skyrocketed. For many, the Crimean Peninsula carries special significance. To the average Russian, it is a Russian imperial territory with a Russian-speaking population and a crucial military bastion in Sevastopol. Thus, the capture of Crimea was perceived by many Russians as an important consolation for the collapse of the Soviet empire, the righting of a historical injustice.
But unlike the current crisis in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea did not involve a confrontation between two heavily armed forces. Putin retook the peninsula, like Catherine the Great had in 1783, without a single shot being fired. By contrast, any campaign to reassert Russian power in Ukraine now seems almost certainly to be both violent and protracted. And on the specific issue of an actual war, many Russians seem to be deeply apprehensive. After all, the war and stalemate in eastern Ukraine that followed the Crimean campaign in 2014 has already cost the lives of thousands of people, including an uncertain number of Russian troops and volunteer fighters. Over time, this has produced an understanding in Russia that an offensive in Ukraine will not work the way it did in Crimea. Russians know that it will be a real war, with victims. And in the face of such a conflict, they are far more ambivalent. Notably, in April 2021, during the initial buildup of Russian forces on the border with eastern Ukraine, public opinion on Russian military action was evenly split: 43 percent of respondents said that Russia should intervene, and the same number said that it should not.
Russian pessimism about the economy reflects growing fears of war.
Russian anxieties about war are even more clear in other recent polling by the Levada Center, the independent Moscow-based polling organization. In focus-group research conducted in December 2021, the center found that many Russians expressed fatigue with being in a constant state of confrontation with the West and Ukraine. The predominant attitude among participants was, “It’s frightening, unpleasant, and I don’t want to get involved.” Driving this deep unease is the sense among many Russians that Russia may soon face large-scale economic costs from the confrontation with the West. In separate December polling, Levada found that the percentage of the population that felt that an “economic crisis” in Russia was possible in the coming year had increased significantly from just one year earlier, rising from less than 50 percent to some 64 percent.
The growing economic pessimism appears to track closely with assumptions about a possible war. Notably, in the December survey, the proportion of Russians who anticipated “armed conflict with a neighboring country” in the coming year had risen by a similar amount—14 percent—going from less than a quarter of the population a year earlier to well over a third. And crucially—given the current situation in Ukraine—the number who expected a war with the United States or NATO in the coming year has nearly doubled, from 14 percent to 25 percent of the population. At the same time, there seems to be growing concerns about the prospects of a wider “world war.” In another recent Levada survey of Russians’ most common fears, the fear of a new world war ranked second only to the fear that loved ones or children will fall ill. According to the poll, a clear majority of Russians—56 percent—indicated they fear a new world war, while another 14 percent indicated they are moderately concerned about it. (Ranking a close third was “abuse of power by the authorities,” which 53 percent of Russians indicated they fear a lot and another 18 percent indicated they fear at least some of the time.)
Even without an actual war, Russian GDP and inflation forecasts for 2022 are already dismal. In recent weeks, the confrontation with the West has weakened the ruble, which had remained relatively stable in 2021, and damaged Russia’s stock markets, affecting global financial markets. Moreover, the apparent good news that real disposable income in Russia has finally begun to grow again after years of decline has been tempered by the fact that it is growing from a low starting point and only because of pent-up demand caused by the pandemic. Gloomy consumer sentiment has been augmented by concerns that new Western sanctions could leave Russia without a convertible currency or access to the SWIFT international payment system.
In general, Western sanctions have not played a deciding role in Russian attitudes about Kremlin policies, with recent polling showing that only 46 percent of Russians believe that sanctions will affect the general population, as opposed to the Kremlin elite. That could change rapidly, though, once the effects are felt. In a recent report that has also been noted in the Russian press, economists from the Washington-based Institute of International Finance conclude that a suspension of SWIFT access would “sharply limit” the ability of everyday Russians to conduct international financial transactions. The most prominent Russian macroeconomists have also made concerning forecasts. In late January, Evsey Gurvich, the head of the Economic Expert Group, an independent Moscow-based economics research organization, said that, “if sanctions are expanded, Russia’s economy will go into zero growth or a slight minus.”
Bombing Voronezh
By far the largest concern for many Russians about a war in Ukraine is the nature of the conflict. The Soviet Union fought proxy wars with the United States in Korea, the Middle East, and Vietnam, but those were distant territories involving populations with little connection to Russia. During those conflicts, Russians tended to support the wars, but few other than professional military personnel knew the true extent of Soviet involvement. The exception to this was the invasion of the Afghanistan in 1979, which greatly undermined the Soviet Union both morally and financially. In addition, Afghanistan shared a border with the Soviet Union, as Ukraine does with the Russian Federation today, and the war could not be ignored. During the Afghanistan conflict, large numbers of young Russians were sacrificed, and many families lived in constant fear of their sons being drafted into the army.
As with the war in Afghanistan, many people worry that a war in Ukraine is unlikely to be bloodless, and they fear for their boys. Ukraine is right next door. And although many Russians have family ties with Ukrainians, they do not share Putin’s view that Ukrainians and Russians are the same nation. According to a recent joint survey by Levada and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, the most commonly held view among Russians—representing more than 51 percent of the population—is that Russia and Ukraine should be independent but friendly states “without visas and customs.” Approximately the same proportion of Ukrainians—49 percent—hold the same opinion. By contrast, only 16 percent of Russians and six percent of Ukrainians support the idea of a unified state. Notably, two-thirds of Russians between the ages of 18 and 24—those who would be most likely to fight in Putin’s war—have a positive attitude toward Ukraine and may be very reluctant to fight at all.
Russian wars have often coincided with growing repression at home.
Until now, Putin’s foreign policies have generally seemed to buttress his popularity. Along with the annexation of Crimea, Russians have generally supported the Kremlin’s efforts to back the separatist regions of eastern Ukraine. Every military operation since the short war with Georgia in August 2008, including the Russian campaign in Syria, has either raised or sustained Putin’s and the Kremlin’s approval ratings.
But many Russians are also aware of another pattern that has very often gone together with foreign interventions, both during Soviet times and under Putin: Russian military actions have often coincided with growing repression or economic breakdown at home. When the Soviet Union entered Czechoslovakia in 1968, for example, there was a distinct political chill inside Russia. The pressure was ramped up on dissidents, and the economic reforms of then Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin were halted. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, which caused an enormous drain on the Russian economy, helped precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union. More recently, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, although popular in itself, has also led to new government pressures on civil society and a relentless crackdown on the political opposition.
Notably, it was also in the wake of the Crimea annexation that the Russian economy began to stagnate. Amid Western sanctions and a sustained slump in oil prices, the real incomes of Russians began a seven-year decline. In modern Russian, there is an expression for this kind of self-destructive behavior: “Bombing Voronezh,” with “Voronezh” a shorthand for a typical midsize Russian city. Pushing back at NATO with a war that causes more Russians to be killed and worsens the economic and political situation of ordinary Russians is a perfect example of bombing Voronezh.
The Price for Putin
For now, it is unclear whether public attitudes will have any effect on the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine. In recent years, including over the last six months of 2021, Putin’s approval ratings have largely remained unchanged. Although Putin’s ratings have little meaning in comparison with those of Western leaders, given the lack of any effective opposition in Russia, Putin continues to enjoy the approval of more than 60 percent of the population. And he seems to be convinced that first, returning Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence and turning it into a buffer state is an achievable goal and second, moving toward that goal can maintain and reinforce his popularity at home.
So far, he has succeeded. He has kept the world in a state of tension and uncertainty without significantly undermining his support at home. And currently, there is no organized movement in Russia against a war. But that could quickly change in the event of a military conflict. For one thing seems clear: Russians are unwilling to bear the price of a war. The Kremlin has always feared the possibility of a “color revolution” inside Russia, assuming it would come from liberal critics of the regime. But a greater threat may come from ordinary Russians who are dissatisfied with the current economic situation, including those who voted for the communists in the recent parliamentary elections of 2021. If enough Russians become convinced that a war or the prospect of a war poses a threat to their economic livelihood, support for the regime could erode.
Whether or not this reality will have any effect on the Kremlin’s thinking is far from certain. Putin may well calculate that the benefits of reasserting Russian power outweigh any political costs. But if he does, he may not only push Ukrainians further away from Russia; he may also push Russians further away from the Kremlin.
4. McConnell Says RNC Shouldn’t Have Censured Cheney and Kinzinger
According to McConnell the activities on January 6th were not legitimate political discourse.
This is a very powerful and very important statement.
Excerpts:
But he reiterated his position that what happened on Jan. 6 was “a violent insurrection” that was intended to “prevent the peaceful transfer of power after legitimately certified elections, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
McConnell Says RNC Shouldn’t Have Censured Cheney and Kinzinger
Many Republican lawmakers have criticized ‘legitimate political discourse’ language in resolution
“Traditionally the view of the national party committee is that we support all members of our party regardless of their positions on some issues,” he said.
A resolution calling for the censure of Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois passed Friday in a voice vote during a meeting of the Republican National Committee in Salt Lake City. The RNC, which is closely aligned with former President Donald Trump, is made up of party officials representing U.S. states and territories. Mr. Trump congratulated the RNC for the vote, calling Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger “two horrible RINOs who put themselves ahead of our country,” referring to Republicans in name only.
The text of the RNC resolution accused Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger of disloyalty to the party for serving on the Jan. 6 panel and said they “are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
After the wording drew criticism for potentially defending people engaged in violence on Jan. 6, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel issued a statement that the RNC was referring to people who were engaged in “legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”
Mr. McConnell, who has accused Mr. Trump of provoking the mob that attacked the Capitol, said Tuesday that he has confidence in Ms. McDaniel. But he reiterated his position that what happened on Jan. 6 was “a violent insurrection” that was intended to “prevent the peaceful transfer of power after legitimately certified elections, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reiterated his position that the Jan. 6 Capitol attack was ‘a violent insurrection.’
Photo: shawn thew/Shutterstock
In a separate development last Friday, former Vice President Mike Pence rejected Mr. Trump’s repeated claims that Mr. Pence could have overturned the 2020 election outcome during the session of Congress that was interrupted by pro-Trump rioters. He also said the party should be focused on coming elections rather than continuing to make false claims that the 2020 result was fraudulent.
The rival stances within the party highlight the continued divisions over Mr. Trump’s legacy and continued influence. A January poll by NBC News shows the share of Republicans who consider themselves more supporters of Mr. Trump than supporters of the GOP has declined, with 56% calling themselves backers of the party to 36% of Mr. Trump. Back in October 2020, those numbers were 54% for Mr. Trump and 38% for the party.
On Capitol Hill, some Republican lawmakers distanced themselves this week from the RNC’s “legitimate political discourse” language, and warned that censuring Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger and re-litigating the events of Jan. 6 could distract from the party’s efforts to win back control of Congress.
“Those who assaulted police officers, broke windows and breached the Capitol were not engaged in legitimate political discourse, and to say otherwise is absurd,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine).
Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) said he disapproved of the decision by Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger to join the panel, which he called a partisan effort, but also criticized the RNC censure.
“They said in the resolution that they wanted Republicans to be unified. That was not a unifying action,” he said of the censure resolution.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah), a former Republican presidential nominee who voted twice to convict Mr. Trump on impeachment counts, said the RNC action undercut the party.
“One, to sanction two people of character as they did. But number two, to suggest that a violent attack on the seat of democracy is ‘legitimate political discourse’ is so far from accurate as to shock and make people wonder what we’re thinking,” Mr. Romney said.
Mr. Romney said he and Ms. McDaniel, his niece, exchanged texts about the censure resolution, and he expressed his point of view.
“Anything that my party does that comes across as being stupid is not going to help us,” he said.
The nine-member Jan. 6 committee was created last year in a largely party line vote, after Mr. McConnell and Senate Republicans blocked the creation of an independent commission. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) appointed Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger to the committee after rejecting two of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s picks to serve on the panel: Reps. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.), both close Trump allies.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) wouldn’t say what he personally thought about the censure resolution, but he said most of his GOP constituents in his home state agree with it.
“Listen, whatever you think about the RNC vote, it reflects the view of most Republican voters,” Mr. Hawley said.
Some House Republicans have pushed to remove Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger from their conference for participating in the Jan. 6 committee. At a press conference, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), a member of House GOP leadership, said the matter didn’t come up at a conference meeting Tuesday. Ms. Stefanik replaced Ms. Cheney as the No. 3 House Republican after party lawmakers voted to oust Ms. Cheney from her leadership post in May.
Ms. Stefanik added that the RNC has “every right to take any action.”
5. The War on Free Speech
Conclusion:
The free-speech recession must be resisted by people around the world who have benefited from the revolutionary acts and sacrifices of the millions who came before them and fought for the cherished right to speak one’s mind. It is up to those who already enjoy that right to defend the tolerance of heretical ideas, limit the reach of disinformation, agree to disagree without resorting to harassment or hate, and treat free speech as a principle to be upheld universally rather than a prop to be selectively invoked for narrow, tribalistic point-scoring. As George Orwell put it in 1945: “If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.” Free speech is still an experiment, and in the digital age, no one can guarantee the outcome of providing global platforms to billions of people. But the experiment is noble—and worth continuing.
The War on Free Speech
Censorship’s Global Rise
March/April 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media · February 9, 2022
The roots of free speech are ancient, deep, and sprawling. The Athenian statesman Pericles extolled the democratic values of open debate and tolerance of social dissent in 431 BC. In the ninth century, the irreverent freethinker Ibn al-Rawandi used the fertile intellectual climate of the Abbasid caliphate to question prophecy and holy books. In 1582, the Dutchman Dirck Coornhert insisted that it was “tyrannical to . . . forbid good books in order to squelch the truth.” The first legal protection of press freedom was instituted in Sweden in 1766. In 1770, Denmark became the first state in the world to abolish any and all censorship.
Today, people in developed democracies take for granted that free speech is a fundamental right. That concept, however, would never have taken root if not for the work of trailblazers who were vilified and persecuted for ideas that many of their contemporaries considered radical and dangerous. They include the seventeenth-century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who argued that “in a free state everyone is at liberty to think as he pleases, and to say what he thinks”; the so-called Levellers of seventeenth-century England, for whom free and equal speech was a precondition for egalitarian democracy; the French feminist Olympe de Gouges, who wrote in 1791 that “a woman has the right to be guillotined; she should also have the right to debate”; and the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who saw free speech as a weapon against slavery and thought that “the right of speech is a very precious one, especially to the oppressed.”
If these pioneers were alive today, they would no doubt see the twenty-first century as an unprecedented golden age of free speech. They would marvel at what people in much of the world can freely and immediately discuss, across time zones and borders, with no Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) to censor blasphemy, no Star Chamber to punish sedition, no Committee of Public Safety to guillotine political heretics, and no lynch mobs to attack abolitionists. At a global level, the principle of free speech has been transformed into an international human rights norm, and its practice has been aided by advances in communications technology unimaginable to the early modern mind.
Given the epic struggles and enormous sacrifices that led to this happy outcome, there is indeed much to celebrate about the current condition of free expression. But despite the unprecedented ubiquity of speech and information today, the golden age is coming to an end. Today, we are witnessing the dawn of a free-speech recession.
According to V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy), a research institute that analyzes global democracy, 2020 saw substantial declines in the respect for freedom of expression in 32 countries; in the year before that, censorship intensified in a record-breaking 37 countries. These developments had terrible consequences for the media and reporters. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented the imprisonment of 1,010 individual journalists between 2011 and 2020, an alarming 78 percent increase from the previous decade.
In some countries, the free-speech recession looks more like a depression. In India, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has relied heavily on the type of colonial-era laws against sedition and enmity that the British once used to convict Mahatma Gandhi and other Indian nationalists. Modi has used those laws to silence environmental activists, politicians, journalists, academics, and minorities—in stark contrast to Gandhi’s passionate defense of free speech, which he considered “absolutely necessary for a man to breathe the oxygen of liberty.”
Today, we are witnessing the dawn of a free-speech recession.
Free speech is faring even worse in Hong Kong, where the Chinese Communist Party has completed a striking transformation of the city since cracking down on pro-democracy protests in 2019. What had been a small oasis of free expression, with a vibrant civil society and a critical press, is now a barren desert where democracy activists, academics, and independent media are punished with draconian laws against what the CCP deems terrorism, secession, or sedition.
Freedom of speech and the media have also been targeted in the EU member states of Hungary and Poland, where illiberal governments view media pluralism and minority voices as a threat rather than a strength. In both places, right-wing leaders have put in place laws aimed at ensuring de facto dominance by government-friendly media outlets and reducing the visibility of LGBTQ people.
But brutal repression in authoritarian states and creeping censorship in illiberal democracies only partly explain why free speech is in retreat. Liberal democracies, rather than constituting a counterweight to the authoritarian onslaught, are themselves contributing to the free-speech recession. In the wealthy, established democracies of Europe and North America, elites in political, academic, and media institutions that once cherished free expression as the lifeblood of democracy now worry that “free speech is killing us,” as the title of a 2019 New York Times op-ed by the writer Andrew Marantz put it. Many now point to unmediated disinformation and hateful speech on the Internet as evidence that free speech is being weaponized against democracy itself. Meanwhile, the growing strength and geopolitical clout of authoritarian and illiberal regimes have led to brutal limits on freedom of expression in many developing and middle-income countries that not long ago seemed poised to become freer, more open societies.
It is true that freedom of speech can be exploited to amplify division, sow distrust, and inflict serious harm. And the right to free expression is not absolute; laws properly prohibit threats and incitement to violence, for example. But the view that today’s fierce challenges to democratic institutions and values can be overcome by rolling back free speech is deeply misguided. Laws and norms protecting free speech still constitute “the great bulwark of liberty,” as the British essayist Thomas Gordon wrote in 1721. If not maintained, however, a bulwark can break, and without free speech, the future will be less free, democratic, and equal—and more ignorant, autocratic, and oppressive. Rather than abandon this most essential right, democracies should renew their commitment to free speech and use it to further liberal democratic ideals and counter authoritarian advances.
SAY ANYTHING
Europe is the laboratory where the principle of free speech was first developed and experimented with in a systematic fashion. Over time, different rulers tinkered with different combinations of freedom and restriction. So far in the twenty-first century, more restrictions than freedoms have been added to the mix.
Since 2008, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, western European countries have experienced a sharp decline in civil liberties as “infringements of free speech . . . have increased.” In recent years, both the European Commission and the governments of Austria, Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom have pursued what the German political scientist Karl Loewenstein termed “militant democracy”: the idea that democracies must deny basic democratic freedoms to those who reject basic democratic values. France has adopted a law prohibiting the online “manipulation of information” during elections. French President Emmanuel Macron’s government has also issued decrees banning the right-wing anti-immigrant organization Génération Identitaire (citing alleged hate speech) and the antidiscrimination group the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (citing what was considered the group’s defense of terrorism and anti-Semitism). Even criticizing Macron himself is risky these days. Last September, a man was fined more than $11,000 for depicting Macron as Adolf Hitler on billboards protesting France’s COVID-19 policies.
In 2020, Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, coordinated a crackdown on online hate speech in seven member countries. Among them was Germany, where police searched more than 80 houses, seizing smartphones and laptops, and questioned almost 100 suspects about hateful posts that included “insulting a female politician.”
Denmark, along with its Scandinavian neighbors, ranks as one of the world’s most open democracies, with a long tradition of tolerating even totalitarian ideas. But during the past decade, Danish governments on both the left and the right have restricted free speech by toughening libel laws, increasing the punishment for insulting public officials and politicians, instituting a de facto ban on wearing veils that fully cover one’s face in public, adopting laws punishing religious “hate preachers” at home and banning foreign ones from entering the country, expanding the scope of laws against hate speech, and presenting a draft bill requiring social media platforms to remove any illegal content within 24 hours of receiving a complaint.
A new generation of progressives want to purge ideas they deem racist, sexist, or anti-LGBTQ.
In the United States, the legal protections afforded by the First Amendment remain strong. But for many Americans, the underlying ideal of what some First Amendment scholars have termed “free speech exceptionalism” has lost its appeal. As an abstract principle, Americans continue to support free speech. In practice, however, that support frequently collapses along unforgiving tribalistic and identitarian lines. Despite American liberalism’s tenet that free speech is necessary to protect historically persecuted minorities against outbreaks of majoritarian intolerance, this civil libertarian ideal no longer persuades a new generation of progressives who want to purge an ever-broadening collection of ideas and views they deem racist, sexist, or anti-LGBTQ from universities, media outlets, and cultural institutions. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education documented more than 500 attempts between 2015 and 2021 to professionally sanction scholars for engaging in constitutionally protected forms of speech. Over two-thirds of the scholars targeted for speech involving race or gender faced investigations, suspension, censorship, demotion, or termination. Many of those cases stemmed from pedagogically justifiable uses of offensive language. Last year, for example, the University of Illinois law professor Jason Kilborn was suspended after a student complained about an exam question that referenced racial and misogynistic slurs—even though the exam presented only the first letter of each term, with asterisks replacing the rest of the word.
This new American skepticism of free speech is hardly consigned to the political left. As president, Donald Trump attacked the media as “the true Enemy of the people,” proposed tightening libel laws, and advocated punishing people who burn the American flag, an act protected by the First Amendment. Consequently, according to polls conducted by YouGov during Trump’s presidency, a plurality of Republicans supported giving courts the power to shut down media outlets for inaccurate or biased news stories and stripping flag burners of U.S. citizenship. Despite professing concern for free speech, conservatives have also responded to the rise of so-called identity politics and what they decry as “cancel culture” with illiberal laws prohibiting the discussion of certain conceptions of and theories about race, gender, and even history in educational settings.
On occasion, the assault on free speech has become a bipartisan affair. Several states and a bipartisan majority in the U.S. Senate have adopted or promoted laws punishing businesses for supporting boycotts of Israel and Israeli settlements, despite federal court rulings that the right to boycott to influence political change is protected by the First Amendment. Many Democrats and Republicans have also found common ground on the idea of stripping social media platforms of the broad legal protections they enjoy when it comes to user-generated content—although the liberal and conservative justifications for that proposed step differ greatly. Democrats want to rein in disinformation and hate speech, whereas Republicans oppose Big Tech because of what they see as Silicon Valley’s anticonservative bias. But the combined force of this enmity raises serious questions about the long-term prospects for free speech in the United States.
EGALITARIAN OR ELITIST?
Perhaps nowhere has the erosion of free speech been more apparent than on the Internet. In 1999, one of the primary architects of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, described his vision of a decentralized space unfettered by the censorship of “hierarchical classification systems” imposed by others. In 2020, however, Internet freedom receded for the 11th straight year according to Freedom House, which attributed the trend to a “record-breaking crackdown on freedom of expression online.” The techno-optimist’s ideal has given way to an Internet aggressively policed by states and by corporate behemoths that carry out what some have dubbed “moderation without representation,” using opaque algorithms to define the limits of global debate with little transparency or accountability.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that the global expansion of free speech that the Internet allows would produce harmful unintended consequences. Along with spreading truthful information and fostering tolerance, a free and open network accessible to billions of people across the world inevitably disseminates lies and amplifies hateful rhetoric. It was also predictable that authoritarian regimes whose hold on power was challenged by the Internet would invest heavily in reimposing their control of the means of communication. In the twentieth century, authoritarians and totalitarians of every stripe turned the press and broadcast media into fine-tuned instruments of propaganda at the same time as they ruthlessly censored and repressed dissent. Today, authoritarian states—with China leading the charge—are reverse engineering the technology that was supposed to make it impossible for censorship to silence dissent at home and sow division and distrust abroad. In 2000, U.S. President Bill Clinton famously remarked that China’s attempts to crack down on the Internet were “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” Some 20 years later, the Jell-O is firmly attached to the wall—and a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping hangs on the nail.
Surveillance in Beijing, June 2019
Jason Lee / Reuters
History should have made clear that radical developments in communications technology would not entice elites and gatekeepers to willingly give up their privileges and admit previously voiceless groups into the public sphere. New communications technology is inevitably disruptive. Every new advancement—from the printing press to the Internet—has been opposed by those whose institutional authority is vulnerable to being undermined by sudden change. In 1525, the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, himself a prodigious writer, complained that printers “fill the world with pamphlets and books [that are] foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive.” In 1858, The New York Times lamented that communication via transatlantic telegraph was “superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth.” In 2006, Barack Obama, then a Democratic senator from Illinois, praised the Internet as “a neutral platform” that allowed him to “say what I want without censorship.” Social media would later play an important role in his rise to the presidency. But 14 years later, after the presidential election of 2020, Obama declared online disinformation “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”
The fundamental disagreement about free speech among democrats in the digital age can be boiled down to two opposing understandings. An egalitarian conception of free speech stresses the importance of providing everyone with a voice in public affairs regardless of status or education. An elitist conception, on the other hand, prefers a public sphere mediated by institutional gatekeepers who can ensure the “responsible” diffusion of information and opinion. The clash between these two perspectives stretches back to antiquity and originated in the differences between Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism. In Athens, ordinary free male citizens enjoyed a direct voice in political decision-making and the right to speak frankly in public (the fate of Socrates notwithstanding). Rome, in contrast, limited free speech to a small elite; others had to tread carefully, lest they run afoul of laws against licentiousness, which could lead to banishment or execution.
THE DIGITAL CITY
The tension between these egalitarian and elitist ideals has dominated the history of free speech ever since, even as the mediums have changed and technology has advanced. Outbreaks of elite panic often reflect real concerns and dilemmas but often result in policies that are likely to worsen the problems they were intended to solve. Take Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which was put into effect in 2017 and obliges social media platforms to remove illegal content or face huge fines. The law has done little to check hatred online but has incentivized Big Tech platforms to expand their definitions of prohibited speech and extremism and turbocharge their automated content moderation—resulting in the deletion of massive amounts of content that was perfectly legal.
The law’s most discernible impact, however, may have been to serve as a blueprint for Internet censorship, providing a veneer of legitimacy to authoritarian regimes around the globe that have explicitly cited the German law as an inspiration for their own censorship laws. The law was a good faith effort to curb online hate speech but has helped spark a regulatory race to the bottom that undermines freedom of expression as guaranteed by international human rights standards. Although it would be misleading to blame Germany for the draconian laws adopted in authoritarian states, those countries’ embrace of restrictions resembling NetzDG should give Germany and other Western democracies pause.
The importance of free speech in the digital space is clear to embattled pro-democracy activists in places such as Belarus, Egypt, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Russia, and Venezuela, where they depend on the ability to communicate and organize—and to the regimes of these countries, which view such activities as an existential threat. And when liberal democracies pass censorship laws or when Big Tech platforms prohibit certain kinds of speech or bar certain users, they make it easier for authoritarian regimes to justify their repression of dissent. In this way, democracies and the companies that thrive in them sometimes unwittingly help entrench regimes that fuel propaganda and disinformation in those very same democracies.
Societies that depend on the centralized control of information will be neither free nor vibrant.
These conflicting dynamics are playing out in a context in which there is no clear legitimate authority, shared values, or principles on which to build a global framework for free speech. This reflects a much deeper and fundamental disconnect between what the philosopher of technology L. M. Sacasas has called “the Digital City,” where we live our hyperconnected lives in the Internet era, and “the Analog City,” where life took place in the industrial era, prior to mass digitization. Modern humans increasingly inhabit the former while trying to make sense of its unprecedented informational order according to the principles and assumptions of the latter. The result has been a tendency toward a fragmentation of the public sphere, with plummeting trust in established sources of information and political institutions.
The disruptive effects of switching from the Analog City to the Digital City are unlikely to run their course anytime soon. The printing press had been around for 70 years before it caught on and helped launch the Protestant Reformation. In comparison, the World Wide Web has been around for only 30 years or so, and Google, Facebook, and Twitter were founded in 1998, 2004, and 2006, respectively. These may well be just the early days of the digital age, with massive disruptions still to come.
Over the past two years, a torrent of lies and conspiracy theories have taken a toll. They have made it harder to contain a deadly pandemic. And they led millions to reject the legitimacy of a presidential election in the world’s most powerful democracy, culminating in the first violent attack on the peaceful transfer of power ever witnessed in the United States. If these pathologies are but a harbinger of things to come in the Digital City, no wonder many still cling to the relative certainty and informational structure of the Analog City. It might be tempting to simply condemn huge swaths of cyberspace as irreparably corrupt and close them off, much as the Ottoman emperors in the sixteenth century shunned the printing press in a bid to avoid the political chaos and religious conflict that had unsettled Europe in part because of changes ushered in by the freer spread of information. That choice might have seemed prudent at the time; now, however, it looks like a costly miscalculation, as the compound knowledge and ideas spread by the printing press eventually helped Europe lay the foundation for global dominance, even as religious wars were raging across the continent. Modern democracies are unlikely to err so badly. But when Macron insists that in democracies, the “Internet is much better used by those on the extremes,” and when Obama cautions that online disinformation poses “the single biggest threat” to democracy, they are inflating the threat and courting overreaction.
Net neutrality supporters in Los Angeles, November 2017
Kyle Grillot / Reuters
There is no denying that the backlash against social media has had consequences. Facebook and Twitter originally displayed a strong civil libertarian impulse inspired by First Amendment ideals. As late as 2012, Twitter only half-jokingly described itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” But as the scrutiny grew more intense and the calls for more content removal and regulation grew ever louder, the platforms changed their tune and started emphasizing the values of “safety” and preventing “harm.” In a 2017 hearing before a hostile British Parliament, a Twitter vice president waved the white flag and announced that the platform was ditching its “John Stuart Mill–style philosophy.” And in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, called for stronger regulation of the Internet, knowing full well that few other platforms would be able to spend as many resources on content moderation as Facebook does.
In recent years, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have altered their terms of service in ways that have led to the banning of more content and broader categories of speech. Facebook deleted 26.9 million pieces of content for allegedly violating its standards on hate speech in the last quarter of 2020. That is nearly 17 times the 1.6 million deletions of alleged hate speech in the last quarter of 2017. Twitter and YouTube also removed record levels of content in 2020. Those caught in the dragnet are not all neo-Nazis or violent jihadis; others whose content has been purged include activists documenting war crimes in Syria, racial and sexual minorities using slurs to expose bigotry, and Russians critical of President Vladimir Putin. No government in history has ever been able to exert such extensive control over what people all over the world are saying, writing, reading, watching, listening to, and sharing with others.
Ultimately, any society that becomes dependent on the centralized control of information and opinion will be neither free nor vibrant. Past attempts to rid the public sphere of ideas that authorities or elites considered extreme or harmful have tended to exclude the poor and the propertyless, foreigners, women, and religious, racial, ethnic, national, and sexual minorities. Until relatively recently in historical terms, those in power have deemed people in these categories too credulous, fickle, immoral, ignorant, or dangerous to have a voice in public affairs.
Liberal democracies must come to terms with the fact that in the Digital City, citizens and institutions cannot be shielded from hostile propaganda, hateful content, or disinformation without compromising their egalitarian and liberal values. Whatever fundamental reforms governments must pursue to ensure that humans can thrive, trust one another, and flourish in the Digital City, a robust commitment to free speech should be recognized as a necessary part of the solution rather than an outdated ideal to be discarded.
THE POWER OF SPEECH
Rather than trying to save democracy by sacrificing free speech, democracies must rediscover its enormous potential. Recent history provides both inspiration for how they can do so and stark warnings about the dangers of letting authoritarian states win the fight on where to draw redlines. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the legally binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) were negotiated at the UN in the years following World War II, liberal democracies and the Soviet bloc fought bitterly about the limits of free speech. The Soviets sought to include an obligation to ban hate speech in accordance with Article 123 of Joseph Stalin’s 1936 constitution, which prohibited any “advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt.”
In the face of this pressure, Eleanor Roosevelt, the first chair of what was then the UN Commission on Human Rights, emerged as an eloquent defender of free-speech maximalism. She warned that the Soviet proposals “would be extremely dangerous” and were likely to be “exploited by totalitarian States.” Democracies managed to defeat hate-speech bans in the UDHR, but ultimately, the Soviet agenda won the day: Article 20 of the ICCPR obliges states to prohibit specific forms of incitement to hatred. Predictably, Soviet-backed communist states used laws against hate speech and incitement as part of their arsenal against dissent and political enemies at home, a tactic still in use by authoritarian states. But the initial fight at the UN over the limits of free speech in international human rights law was only the first of several rounds that would be fought over the coming decades.
In 1975, the Helsinki Final Act was signed by 35 countries under the auspices of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The act’s primary ambition was to ease Cold War tensions, but Western democracies persuaded the Soviet bloc to accept the inclusion of human rights provisions. The communist regimes objected to the human rights language during the lengthy negotiations. They were already fighting an uphill battle to jam the radio signals of Western radio stations that broadcast uncensored news into the homes of millions of people behind the Iron Curtain. In 1972, using rhetoric eerily similar to that now used by many democratic leaders, Soviet officials had declared that they would never tolerate “the dissemination of . . . racism, fascism, the cult of violence, hostility among peoples and false slanderous propaganda.” Nevertheless, the Soviet bloc swallowed the human rights concessions, which they viewed as little more than empty rhetoric.
Instead of sacrificing free speech, democracies must rediscover its enormous potential.
But through newspaper reports, word of mouth, samizdat publications, and Western radio broadcasts, people in Eastern Europe quickly learned about the new rights that their governments had solemnly promised to respect. And among the rights guaranteed by the Helsinki Final Act, perhaps none was more important than freedom of expression. The principle and practice of free speech were used by Western democracies and burgeoning human rights organizations to empower and amplify the protests of Soviet-bloc dissidents. The famous Charter 77 manifesto, authored in 1977 by an eclectic mix of Czechoslovak dissidents—including Vaclav Havel, the country’s future leader—complained that “the right to freedom of expression, for example, guaranteed by Article 19 of the ICCPR, is in our case purely illusory.” In 1990, after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, Havel, who had become president, gave a triumphant speech to the U.S. Congress:
When [Communist authorities] arrested me . . . , I was living in a country ruled by the most conservative communist government in Europe, and our society slumbered beneath the pall of a totalitarian system. Today, less than four months later, I’m speaking to you as the representative of a country that has set out on the road to democracy, a country where there is complete freedom of speech.
Likewise, Lech Walesa, the trade union leader who went on to serve as the president of Poland in the post–Cold War period, recalled that in his successful struggle to topple communism, “one of the central freedoms at stake was freedom of expression.” Walesa noted that “without this basic freedom, human life becomes meaningless; and once the truth of this hit me, it became part of my whole way of thinking.”
Later, free speech also contributed to ending apartheid in South Africa, where censorship and repression had been used to maintain white supremacy. In 1994, shortly before winning the country’s first free presidential election, Nelson Mandela gave a speech in which he credited the international media for shining a global spotlight on the atrocities committed by the apartheid regime. He then promised to abolish apartheid-era laws limiting free expression, a right that he pledged would constitute one of the “core values” of South African democracy.
More recently, in 2011, the Obama administration notched a rare but important win amid the current era’s free-speech recession. For more than a decade, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation had mobilized majorities at the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council to support resolutions against “the defamation of religion.” The OIC’s campaign was an attempt to pass a legally binding ban on religious blasphemy at the UN—a step that would have effectively extended the writ of regimes in Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia that severely punish satire, criticism, and irreverent discussions of Islam. In response, the United States, with assistance from a number of European democracies, launched a multilateral global offensive to stop the OIC’s effort. The strategy worked and not only defended but also expanded existing free-speech norms, leading to the adoption of a resolution that affirmed that human rights law protects people, not religions or ideologies. Although the resolution condemned advocacy of incitement to hatred, it called on the criminalization only of “incitement to imminent violence based on religion or belief.” Moreover, the resolution helped remedy the original sin of international human rights law by narrowing the obligation to prohibit incitement to hatred inserted in the ICCPR at the behest of the Soviet Union back in the 1960s.
THE TALKING CURE
These precedents provide democracies with a guide for how to promote the fundamental value of free speech. Instead of launching global initiatives limiting that freedom, democracies should join forces to expand the shrinking spaces for dissent and civil society around the globe. One way to do so is through concerted efforts to expose and condemn censorship and repression and to offer civil society organizations and dissidents technical support that can amplify dissent and circumvent repressive measures. Democracies must be vigilant about protecting norms within international institutions and preventing authoritarian states from taking advantage of elite panic to dilute hard-won speech protections.
Democracies should also push for global Big Tech platforms to voluntarily adopt robust human rights standards to help guide and inform their content moderation policies and practices. This would solidify the sprawling and ever-changing terms of service that previously set the bar significantly lower than what follows from human rights norms and constitutional freedoms in liberal democracies. Such a move would also help online platforms resist the pressure to act as privately outsourced censors of dissent in countries where social media may be the only way for citizens to circumvent official censorship and propaganda.
In addition to direct government action, civil society and technology companies can also contribute to the promotion and protection of free speech. A cottage industry has sprung up to map, analyze, and counter disinformation and propaganda—a far healthier approach than attempts to ban harmful speech. Likewise, several studies suggest that organized campaigns of strategic “counterspeech” can provide an antidote to online hate speech, which frequently targets minority groups. For example, the Swedish online community #jagärhär (#iamhere) has tens of thousands of members who respond to hateful posts on social media—an approach that has been copied by groups in many other countries.
Innovative journalists, activists, and collectives such as Bellingcat are also using open-source intelligence and data to expose the criminal deeds and human rights violations of authoritarian states. Not even China can avoid such scrutiny: unlike the suffering of victims in the Soviet Union’s gulag, to which the world was mostly oblivious, the horrific conditions in China’s network of “reeducation camps” in the western region of Xinjiang have been exposed by journalists, activists, and victims using smartphones, social media, satellites, and messaging apps.
The free-speech recession must be resisted by people around the world who have benefited from the revolutionary acts and sacrifices of the millions who came before them and fought for the cherished right to speak one’s mind. It is up to those who already enjoy that right to defend the tolerance of heretical ideas, limit the reach of disinformation, agree to disagree without resorting to harassment or hate, and treat free speech as a principle to be upheld universally rather than a prop to be selectively invoked for narrow, tribalistic point-scoring. As George Orwell put it in 1945: “If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.” Free speech is still an experiment, and in the digital age, no one can guarantee the outcome of providing global platforms to billions of people. But the experiment is noble—and worth continuing.
Foreign Affairs · by Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media · February 9, 2022
6. Air Force ordered to pay $230 million to Texas church shooting survivors, families of victims
Wow. I do not think I have ever seen such a ruling.
Air Force ordered to pay $230 million to Texas church shooting survivors, families of victims
A judge in San Antonio has ordered the United States Air Force to pay more than $230 million in damages to the survivors and families of victims of a Texas church shooting in 2017, where 26 people were killed and 22 injured by a former airman.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez described in his judgment how, in a span of seven minutes and 24 seconds, the gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, fired 450 rounds using an AR-556 rifle. Worshipers at the small First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., scrambled to take cover under pews during the routine Sunday service, and the massacre left children among the dead and multigenerational gaps in some families.
“Ultimately, there is no satisfying way to determine the worth of these families’ pain,” Rodriguez said in his judgment on Monday. He called the case “unprecedented in kind and scope.”
The compensation comes after a separate trial last year, in which the court concluded that the Air Force did not flag a conviction that may have prevented Kelley from legally buying the weapon used in the shooting. The court found in 2021 “that the Government failed to exercise reasonable care in its undertaking to submit Kelley’s criminal history to the FBI” and therefore held that it was “60% responsible” for the attack and injuries.
The Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post on the compensation.
Kelley first opened fire outside the small community church; the casualties came after he sprayed bullets at the congregation inside before he fled the scene and later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Kelley enlisted in 2010 and served as a logistical readiness airman at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told The Washington Post in the aftermath of the shooting. He had a string of legal troubles beginning as early as 2012, when he was court-martialed and sentenced to a year in military prison for assaulting his wife and child.
Following his prison sentence, Kelley was reduced in rank and released from the military with a bad conduct discharge in 2014. Earlier that year, he was also charged with a misdemeanor count of mistreatment, neglect or cruelty to animals in El Paso County, Colo., where he lived at one point, records show.
A lawyer representing some of the families, Jamal Alsaffar, said they were pleased with the judge’s award.
“These families are the heroes here. While no amount can bring back the many lives lost or destroyed at the hands of the government’s negligence, their bravery in obtaining this verdict will make this country safer,” he told the Associated Press.
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7. Iran Is ‘No. 1 Destabilizing’ Threat In Middle East, CENTCOM Nominee Says
Iran Is ‘No. 1 Destabilizing’ Threat In Middle East, CENTCOM Nominee Says
The U.S. must use advanced technology and work with regional partners to counter Tehran, Army three-star tells lawmakers.
The officer nominated to lead U.S. Central Command wants to use artificial intelligence to counter Iran, which he called the “No. 1 destabilizing factor” in the region.
America must step up its capabilities and maintain strong relationships, said Lt. Gen. Michael Kurilla, the commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps and the nominee to lead America’s military missions in the Middle East.
“Iran is the No. 1 destabilizing factor in the Middle East right now with their malign behavior,” Kurilla said at a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing. “Going through our partners and allies and strengthening those with a united front from all the partners and allies is the best way to confront them.”
He said the military must make better use of artificial intelligence, especially to counter Iran. He said the XVIII Airborne Corps does quarterly exercises to learn to use AI to detect targets for strikes, something he would bring to U.S. Central Command if he is confirmed.
“We must continue investing in technology, to include Artificial Intelligence and machine learning platforms and programs, to increase our ability to detect, defend, and respond to conventional Iranian military capabilities,” Kurilla wrote in written responses to questions from senators.
At the hearing, the Army general said it’s critical to help partners in the region to improve cyber defenses that can protect them from Iran’s “very capable offensive cyber capability.”
Kurilla also addressed the ballistic missiles that the Iranian-backed Houthis have recently fired into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In addition to working to integrate regional allies' air defense systems to defend against such attacks, he also said it’s critical to publicly call out when Iran is behind strikes like those because it can prompt Tehran to pause its violence.
“We have to make sure we expose the Iranian malign behavior,” he said. “I have found that any time Iran’s hand behind this is exposed, it is helpful.”
Officials from the United States as well as from Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom will meet Tuesday in Vienna for the latest round of talks to try to revive the Iran nuclear deal, from which President Donald Trump withdrew. Kurilla said that any “enforceable agreement” that comes out of the talks must ensure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon.
He also acknowledged, however, that any sanctions relief offered to Iran in exchange for ending its pursuit of a nuclear weapon could end up hurting America on the battlefield.
“There is a risk with sanctions relief that Iran would use some of that money to support its proxies and terrorism in the region and if they did it could increase risk to our forces in the region,” he said.
8. The hacked account and suspicious donations behind the Canadian trucker protests
All about the money.
Excerpts:
This movement has raised an astonishing amount of money
A GoFundMe organized for the protesters raised about 9.2 million Canadian dollars ($7.2 million) before the campaign was shut down on Friday. Many donations came from outside Canada, according to Ottawa’s police chief Sloly.
“We are now aware of a significant element from the U.S. that have been involved in the funding, the organizing and the demonstrating,” Sloly said.
GoFundMe said the campaign violated its terms and pledged to refund all contributions to the campaign. Organizers then moved their efforts to GiveSendGo, where they raised millions of dollars in a matter of days.
By comparison, Jan. 6 insurrectionists who ran campaigns on that platform in the months following the U.S. Capitol riots earned far less. A survey of 24 such campaigns, including eight supporting Proud Boys, revealed that they collectively raised less than $250,000 over the course of several weeks.
GiveSendGo released a statement on Monday, saying it has spoken with convoy organizers to ensure that “all funds raised will go to provide humanitarian aid and legal support for the peaceful truckers and their families as they stand for freedom.”
Republican leaders have called for investigations into GoFundMe for canceling the campaign.
The hacked account and suspicious donations behind the Canadian trucker protests
The jumble of misinformation, online fundraising groups and amplification from right-wing political figures suggests there’s more to these protests than meets the eye.
Hundreds of people have been camped out in the icy streets of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, for more than a week, occupying the area around the nation’s government buildings. It’s a protest ostensibly stemming from some Canadian cross-border truckers’ objections to a Canadian requirement that those who cross the border be vaccinated against covid-19.
But a close look at several “Freedom Convoy” groups and crowdfunding efforts online shows the involvement of anonymous actors, deep-pocketed non-Canadian donors and prominent U.S. right-wing political figures.
Some of the largest Facebook groups responsible for galvanizing support, both ideological and financial, appeared to have been administered through a stolen account, Grid has found.
The protests are not organized by Canadian trucking unions, the largest of which has come out against the protests. They also do not appear to reflect the values of most Canadians or most Canadian truckers: More than 80 percent of the Canadian public is vaccinated, including almost 90 percent of truckers, according to Canada’s minister of transport.
The speed at which the movement has raised millions of dollars raises red flags. A now-shuttered GoFundMe page raised nearly $8 million USD; a replacement crowdfunding campaign, on a self-described Christian platform called GiveSendGo, had raised more than $6 million by Tuesday morning, after just three days, with many donations of four and five figures.
The movement smacks of U.S. influence, said Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral scientist at the University of Regina who studies disinformation. “For sure, 100 percent, a large part of this is driven by cultural narratives that have emerged from the United States,” he said.
Right-wing politicians across the United States have praised and promoted this small group. “The Canadian truckers … who are resisting bravely these lawless mandates and doing more to defend American freedom than our own leaders, by far, and we want those great Canadian truckers to know that we are with them all the way!” former president Donald Trump said at a Texas rally on Jan. 29.
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That doesn’t mean that many of the protesters on the ground aren’t true believers — whether about vaccine mandates, broader right-wing causes or even more extreme ideologies, including white nationalism.
“They’re driven by a very deep connection to a cause that they feel to be just,” Pennycook said. “They’re acting in accordance with their attitudes and values, and it just so happens to be the case that a lot of the beliefs that they hold probably aren’t rooted in good evidence. There’s a lot of conspiratorial thinking and distrust of good sources and reliable sources.”
A hacked Facebook account is behind some of the organizing
The entity behind some of the largest Facebook groups supporting the protests is an unknown person or persons who used the Facebook account of a Missouri woman. She says her account on the platform was hacked and stolen.
The account launched a handful of Facebook groups for the protest, all between Jan. 26 and 28, before the trucker convoy reached Ottawa. With a combined following of more than 340,000 members and more than 7,500 posts, the group names were variations on a theme: “Convoy to Ottawa 2022,” “Convoy for Freedom 2022,” “Freedom Convoy/Ottawa 2022 for Canada,” “Freedom Convoy 2022” and “2022 Official Freedom Convoy to Ottawa.”
Facebook groups are organized by administrators. Grid found that the only administrator account for these groups belonged to the Missouri woman. Reached briefly by phone on Monday, she said her account was hacked and she was not involved with the groups.
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“Someone stole my identity on Facebook,” she said. “I don’t know how they [did] it.”
The woman, whom Grid is not naming because she is the victim of apparent identity theft, said her daughter set up a new account for her. A new Facebook account with the woman’s name appeared in October 2021 with the post: “New account. Last one got hacked.”
The groups were disabled Monday afternoon as Grid was reporting this story. Facebook did not immediately respond to questions about the hacked account. “We continue to see scammers latch onto any hot-button issue that draws people’s attention, including the ongoing protests,” Margarita Franklin, a spokeswoman for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said in a statement to media outlets on Monday.
Even as Facebook groups have been taken down, the conversation is alive on Telegram, a United Arab Emirates-based social media platform that claims 500 million users worldwide. Channels cheering on the protests display thousands of subscribed followers, although it is possible to artificially inflate Telegram subscriber numbers. Inside these channels, users share photos and videos and trade misinformation about covid-19 and about the strength of their movement, such as the debunked claim that Canadian armed forces have pledged “allegiance to the people.”
The United States exports misinformation
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned misinformation driving the protests and the movement writ large. He has referred to the protesters as a “fringe minority” engaging in “disinformation and misinformation online, conspiracy theorists, about microchips, about God knows what else that go with the tinfoil hats.”
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Over the weekend, the scene grew rowdy, with reports describing protesters defecating on lawns, desecrating monuments and urinating on war memorials. A reported 8,000 people and 1,000 vehicles, including many eighteen-wheeler trucks, descended along Parliament Hill in Canada’s capital city. Some waved flags with swastikas and the Confederate battle flag. (Notably, about one-fifth of Canadian truckers are of South Asian descent, and many have decried the anti-vaccine movement in the trucker ranks.)
Ottawa’s mayor declared a state of emergency on Sunday. Other protests have cropped up from Toronto to Vancouver. And trucks have blocked a border-crossing site in Coutts, Alberta, a major port of entry at the border with Montana that connects with a trade route leading down to Mexico. On Monday night, protesters also blocked the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit.
The emergence of a strong right-wing element to the protests demonstrates the soup of fringe media that many anti-vaccine protesters swim in, said Pennycook, the behavioral scientist. “For someone to be so fervently against vaccines and opposed to the covid restrictions, those people are often in a kind of right-wing media bubble, one where they don’t really engage with traditional sources of information,” he said. “And the more you engage in that world, the more you can be exposed to alternative perspectives on life. And that fits within the right-wing media ecosystem.”
The Ottawa chief of police, Peter Sloly has described the protesters as “highly organized, well-funded, extremely committed to resisting all attempts to end the demonstrations safely.”
A number of right-wing public figures in the United States have been amplifying the protest, and donations appear to be pouring in from across Canada’s southern border.
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“It’s time for the American people to declare independence from every last covid mandate,” Trump said at the Texas rally. “We have to tell this band of hypocrites, tyrants and racists that we’re done with having them control our lives, mess with our children and close our businesses. We’re moving on from covid whether they like it or not.”
In addition to Trump, Republicans including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Senate hopeful J.D. Vance of Ohio have encouraged the protests. Meanwhile, far-right influencers, like Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee have pushed their audiences to donate to crowdfunding platforms.
This movement has raised an astonishing amount of money
A GoFundMe organized for the protesters raised about 9.2 million Canadian dollars ($7.2 million) before the campaign was shut down on Friday. Many donations came from outside Canada, according to Ottawa’s police chief Sloly.
“We are now aware of a significant element from the U.S. that have been involved in the funding, the organizing and the demonstrating,” Sloly said.
GoFundMe said the campaign violated its terms and pledged to refund all contributions to the campaign. Organizers then moved their efforts to GiveSendGo, where they raised millions of dollars in a matter of days.
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By comparison, Jan. 6 insurrectionists who ran campaigns on that platform in the months following the U.S. Capitol riots earned far less. A survey of 24 such campaigns, including eight supporting Proud Boys, revealed that they collectively raised less than $250,000 over the course of several weeks.
GiveSendGo released a statement on Monday, saying it has spoken with convoy organizers to ensure that “all funds raised will go to provide humanitarian aid and legal support for the peaceful truckers and their families as they stand for freedom.”
Republican leaders have called for investigations into GoFundMe for canceling the campaign.
And a prospective solidarity movement of American truckers may be in the works. A Facebook group planning a cross-country drive to Washington, D.C., was shut down on Monday.
Conservative infighting isn’t just happening in the U.S.
Like the Republican Party in the United States, Canada’s Conservative Party is undergoing an internal struggle between populist and traditionalist factions, said Dominik A. Stecula, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University who studies the media environment and its effect on society. On Feb. 2, the Conservative Party’s leader was ousted, replaced by an interim leader who has been photographed wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. Meanwhile, two Conservative Party members publicly broke with the party in response to the Ottawa protests.
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Social media and the boosting of this protest by American politicians represents a spillover of American culture wars and information disorder polluting other countries’ politics in the process, Stecula added.
“I’m originally from Poland, and I noticed that while there’s no immediate events like the convoy [in Canada], I have been noticing for a while now that there is this exporting of American culture wars into other contexts,” Stecula said. “I think this is a prime example of that.”
In some ways, the situation in Ottawa has evolved into a proxy battle for the American right, said Jacob Remes, a labor, working-class, migration and disaster historian of the U.S. and Canada at New York University.
American donors are not interested in the nuances of the Canadian situation, such as what the Canadian citizenry wants, or the evolution — and perhaps disintegration — of the Canadian Conservative Party.
“But for the Americans, it’s totally irrelevant. They don’t care about who the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada is,” he said. “They just like the idea of a bunch of white truckers being in a national capital and fucking shit up.”
9. Duterte's Growing Overseas Troubles
Outlaw administration.
Excerpts:
In an open letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Finance Secretary Janet Yellen, the bipartisan congressional group, led by Pennsylvania Congresswoman Susan Wild, said they are “asking you to hold officials responsible for grave human rights violations in the Philippines to account through targeted sanctions.”
The officials named “should no longer operate with impunity,” the letter said. “In our stand for democracy, the United States cannot overlook the crisis in the Philippines, and we must take tangible action if we are to truly stand for human rights and the flourishing of freedom around the world. To this end, we urge the imposition of sanctions on individuals who are behind these major human rights violations, particularly via the use of the Global Magnitsky Act.”
The letter, dated January 28, listed a long record of what the group characterized as atrocities, bombings and attacks against civilians, enforced disappearances, torture, and crimes against humanity.
Duterte's Growing Overseas Troubles
The world increasingly sees an outlaw administration
10 hr ago
Despite his phenomenal popularity at home, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is facing growing trouble overseas, with demands for him to stand trial for human rights abuses in the Hague, with his spiritual adviser making the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Most Wanted List for sex trafficking, and with 25 US Congress members asking the government to use the Magnitsky Act against five senior Philippine officials – although not the president himself – for “grave human rights violations.”
The US has already issued travel bans against individuals believed involved in the “preventive detention” of Sen. Lila de Lima, who has spent almost Duterte’s entire term in Camp Crame, the military headquarters, on drug charges that are regarded by human rights organizations as trumped up to neutralize the president’s most influential critic. De Lima is the former head of the Philippines’ Human Rights Commission and an opponent of his drug war.
Domestically, Philippine voters have largely ignored the international opprobrium. Duterte’s trust and approval ratings actually rose in the most recent polls on December 6-10, climbing to 65 percent, up by 5 percentage points from a 60 percent approval rating in the third quarter. His trust rating also rose to 55 percent, 2 percentage points higher than his 53 percent in the last quarter despite revelations of scandals involving the transfer of the Malampaya oil block to a crony, allegations of profiteering on the procurement of Covid-19 medical supplies, and the sale of the media license formerly in the hands of the country’s most popular broadcast license to a crony.
Duterte attained the highest share for “bravery” with 80 percent, “love for the Philippines” with 72 percent, “decisiveness” with 72 percent, and “concern for Filipinos” with 71 percent. As for institutions, the Armed Forces of the Philippines had the highest total approval with 70 percent and the highest total trust with 53 percent despite US allegations of brutality.
The five named by the Congress members stem from the use of “red tags,” by which administration opponents “tag” individuals or organizations as suspected communists or terrorists, regardless of their true affiliations, endangering their lives. They are Edwardo Año, Duterte’s secretary of the interior; Delfin Lorenzana, the national defense secretary; Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr, the deputy director-general of the National Security Council and former army Southern Luzon Command chief; Hermogenes Cendaña Esperon Jr., Duterte’s national security adviser, and Debold Sinas, former national police chief.
“It certainly adds to the pressure against red-tagging in the Philippines,” said a human rights campaigner. “It may or may not amount to anything but I say at least (the lead author) is raising hell about this and the Philippine public is the better for it.”
The Magnitsky Act, passed in 2016 and named for Sergei Magnitsky, a tax lawyer who died in a Russian prison, authorizes the US government to sanction those it sees as human rights offenders, freeze their assets, and ban them from entering the US. Given that many top officials and lawmakers in the Philippines have assets hidden outside the country, it can paralyze their finances. It is the latest indication of a growing reaction to what is regarded as lawlessness in the Philippines on the part of the Duterte administration, which is believed responsible for the extrajudicial deaths of at least 8,000 people, mostly low-level drug users and dealers in Duterte’s misguided war on drugs. Human rights organizations put the total far higher, with some using the figure 30,000 murdered by death squads and law enforcement officials.
Pastor charged
In November, a grand jury in California charged that Apollo Carreon Quiboloy, Duterte’s “spiritual adviser,” and other officials of his church, the “Kingdom of Jesus Christ, The Name Above Every Name,” were running a sex-trafficking operation with links in California that threatened victims as young as 12 with "eternal damnation" and physical abuse.
In addition, the United Nations-based International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, in November 2021 formally authorized an official investigation into alleged crimes against humanity in Duterte’s war on drugs, noting that “specific legal element of the crime against humanity of murder” has been met in the crackdown, which began shortly after Duterte took office in July 2016.
According to a Reuters dispatch, the ICC’s pretrial chamber also said that while it recognizes the Philippines’ duty to fight drug smuggling and addiction, the “so-called ‘war on drugs’ campaign cannot be seen as a legitimate law enforcement operation, and the killings neither as legitimate nor as mere excesses in an otherwise legitimate operation.”
With an election just 90 days away on May 9 – and with campaigning officially opening today, February 8, the winner of the national polls suddenly has great relevance for Duterte, his top officials, and Quiboloy. A friendly winner would be unlikely to extradite them.
Red-tagging a cold-war artifact
Red-tagging has been called a relic of the cold war and has been used by a long list of people including security forces, public servants, politicians, and others to describe what are identified as subversives. But the practice has been used against journalists, actors, human rights workers, civil-rights groups, worker and farmer groups, environmentalists, lawyers, religious figures, and organizations and institutions branded as fronts, supporters, or mere sympathizers of the Communist New People’s Army. A red tag far too often means the designee is marked for death.
In an open letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Finance Secretary Janet Yellen, the bipartisan congressional group, led by Pennsylvania Congresswoman Susan Wild, said they are “asking you to hold officials responsible for grave human rights violations in the Philippines to account through targeted sanctions.”
The officials named “should no longer operate with impunity,” the letter said. “In our stand for democracy, the United States cannot overlook the crisis in the Philippines, and we must take tangible action if we are to truly stand for human rights and the flourishing of freedom around the world. To this end, we urge the imposition of sanctions on individuals who are behind these major human rights violations, particularly via the use of the Global Magnitsky Act.”
The letter, dated January 28, listed a long record of what the group characterized as atrocities, bombings and attacks against civilians, enforced disappearances, torture, and crimes against humanity.
10. Spy world wary as Biden team keeps leaking Russia intel
If we were conducting political warfare would these reports be leaks? Or would they be deliberately released to achieve deliberate psychological effects?
Spy world wary as Biden team keeps leaking Russia intel
U.S. national security figures get that information war is the new battleground. But "how many freaking times do they need to warn that anything may be imminent?” one asked.
U.S. national security figures get that information war is the new battleground. But "how many freaking times do they need to warn that anything may be imminent?” one asked.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a news conference at the State Department in Washington, Monday, Feb. 7, 2022. | Andrew Harnik, Pool/AP Photo
02/08/2022 06:13 PM EST
The Biden administration has gone to unusual lengths to publicly share intelligence about Russia’s threat to Ukraine, using targeted media leaks and other methods to warn the world of everything from the specifics of Moscow’s troop build-up to an alleged Kremlin plot to fake an attack that justifies an invasion.
The strategy has its fans, but some national security veterans wonder if the administration is taking it too far.
U.S. officials say the disclosures are carefully vetted and represent only a small amount of the information America and its allies have gathered as Russian leader Vladimir Putin amasses troops along Ukraine’s border. The goals, they say, include preemptively exposing — and thus derailing — Russian lies that could lead to a war while also putting America and its European allies on the same page.
“We believe … that the best antidote to disinformation is information,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday during an appearance before reporters. It’s an approach that could prove a blueprint going forward as countries increasingly rely on manipulating the information space to further their geopolitical aims.
Among supporters of the effort is Michael Hayden, a former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, who said being more public-leaning on intelligence is something he’s advocated for years given the changing threat landscape. “It’s very different now — the Information Age is very important,” Hayden said.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said approvingly that “leaning in” on intelligence disclosures has given the Russians “fair warning.” “I think that’s, again, put the Russians back a little bit,” he said.
But there have been so many revelations that some national security hands wish administration officials would just shut up. And many, even those who support the disclosures, wonder if President Joe Biden and his aides are being overly alarmist due to past strategic and intelligence failures in places like Ukraine and, more recently, Afghanistan.
“I am concerned about the long-term credibility of our intelligence with all of these select declassifications,” a former CIA officer with expertise on Russia told POLITICO. “If it turns out to be wrong, or partially wrong, it undermines how much our partners trust the info we give them, or, frankly, how much the public trusts it.”
Such views may be in the minority, for now, but across Washington quiet conversations are getting louder about the administration’s unusual openness about intelligence in the face-off with Moscow.
“Traditional warfare has always been about grinding down your adversaries’ will,” said Gavin Wilde, a former U.S. intelligence official with expertise on Russia and information warfare. “We used to be entirely reliant on hard power to do that, and now it’s a whole lot easier to do with the information tools available to us.”
‘A common baseline’
The Biden administration has used an array of tactics to publicly share information and analyses about Russia’s military build-up and intentions.
They include authorized leaks to select news organizations as well as public statements. The administration also consults outside analysts and lawmakers, some of whom then talk about the material with reporters. (Of course, some of the articles published aren’t based on authorized leaks but instead are the work of well-sourced journalists.)
The reports, which have appeared since last fall, have covered everything from U.S. suspicions that Russia could deploy as many as 175,000 troops for a Ukraine invasion to allegations that the Kremlin planned to create a propaganda video about a fake attack by Ukraine that could offer Moscow a pretext for war.
Russia denies it has plans to invade Ukraine. Putin, however, insists that the United States and its European allies must address concerns he has about the expansion of the NATO military alliance, which he views as a threat to his country.
On numerous occasions, Biden administration officials have said a Russian invasion of Ukraine could occur at any moment, citing details about Moscow’s troop deployments in places including the Kremlin-allied country of Belarus.
A former National Security Council official who dealt with Russia argued that the more intelligence the administration releases, the more likely that the Kremlin’s operatives can trace the sources and methods used to obtain it, endangering American assets, including human ones.
“How many freaking times do they need to warn that anything may be imminent?” the former official asked. “Next time we won’t know what the plans are because the Russians won’t use those channels they know we collect on.”
The former official said unveiling Russia’s gray zone tactics makes sense now and then, but “it’s the volume of specific stuff that creates a problem, not any one piece of information per se.”
A senior Biden administration official and a senior U.S. intelligence official, however, said the risks are carefully weighed very step of the way.
“The cost-benefit analysis has so far weighed in favor of sharing as much as feasible given what’s at stake,” the senior intelligence official said. “Also, given European skepticism [about Russia’s motives] in some quarters, there’s a sense that we need to do everything we can to establish a common baseline understanding of the threat.”
While there are lingering questions about some European governments’ willingness to crack down hard on Russia using economic sanctions and military aid to Ukraine, the senior administration official stressed that the intelligence-sharing between America and its European allies has been robust amid the crisis. Last month, the British government made public its suspicions that Moscow was considering installing a puppet regime in Kyiv as part of an effort to control the country.
There’s been no official pushback from U.S. intelligence agencies about how or when the information they’ve gleaned and analyzed is made public, the senior administration official added, implying that a good deal of intelligence remains private. “What we have made public is a small amount of declassified intel that’s been very carefully reviewed for any potential compromise to sources and methods,” the official said.
The release of intelligence about a foe has precedent. Most famously, the George W. Bush administration selectively leaked allegations about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify its 2003 invasion of that country. The claims turned out to be false, but were a precursor to war.
Amid the Ukraine crisis, the sheer amount of information the Biden team is releasing, as well as how frequently and quickly it is doing so, is unusual.
“It’s almost real time,” said Calder Walton, an intelligence historian at Harvard. “It’s the world that we’re in now.”
Walton added, however, that such an approach is “high-risk,” especially if the information is later proven wrong. Iraq is an obvious example, but there are other cases that have eroded U.S. credibility.
In 1983, the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Air Lines civilian passenger plane carrying 269 people. The U.S. almost immediately asserted it was a deliberate act and that the Soviets had to know the nature of the target. President Ronald Reagan called it “barbaric” and a “terrorist act,” and Secretary of State George Shultz held a press conference detailing what American intelligence had picked up about Soviet communications on the incident.
But the United States later had to backtrack as more evidence suggested the Soviets had not known the aircraft was carrying civilians and shot it down thinking it was a U.S. spy plane. “The result was that the Reagan administration undermined its criticism of the Soviet government by overstating its case,” Walton said.
The shadow of Afghanistan
The administration’s decision to go public with its findings likely is rooted in part in lessons U.S. officials have learned from dealing with Russia’s interference in American elections. One of those lessons was that it’s important to alert the U.S. public about Russian disinformation tactics sooner rather than later, so-called pre-bunking.
Many people in the Biden administration — including the president — also were in government the last time Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2014. That invasion involved more surreptitious methods than what Moscow is using now, and in many ways it startled the world. For instance, Putin deployed Russian forces with no insignia on their uniforms to take over the Crimean peninsula. The troops came to be called “little green men.”
Other recent U.S. fumbles may also be influencing the Biden administration’s intense diplomatic as well as intelligence strategies on Russia and Ukraine.
Most recently, the administration has faced opprobrium for its handling of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, including intelligence assessments that failed to foresee how quickly Kabul would fall to the Taliban. Critics of the administration’s Afghan policy said its rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops as well as contractors doomed the Afghan army and the country by pulling out critical support functions.
This time, with Ukraine, “they know that they have to be seen to be a dependable ally,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official said of the Biden team.
U.S. officials downplay if not outright dismiss the Afghanistan factor. Still, it troubles those wary of the possibility of escalating conflict with Russia. Despite Biden’s promises that U.S. troops will not fight in Ukraine if Russia invades, some fear mission creep is inevitable. They question if the intelligence community’s off-the-mark assessments of what would happen in Afghanistan is leading the spy agencies to overcorrect with unduly pessimistic assessments about Ukraine.
“I also wonder if the Afghanistan withdrawal experience might have made the administration more sensitive to criticism from hawks and thus more susceptible to bad hawkish advice,” a senior Democratic congressional aide said.
Despite Russia’s aggressive deployment of some 100,000 troops along the border with Ukraine, it’s entirely possible that the crisis freezes for weeks, if not months, and that eventually Putin pulls all his forces back.
If the public warnings sounded by the Biden administration don’t turn into real moves by Russia, could that hurt the U.S. intelligence community’s credibility?
“I can see that if it becomes a repeated pattern that doesn’t bear out, but it seems to me they had high confidence in [the intelligence] reporting this time,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. “Given the stakes involved those costs seem manageable.”
Besides, as Kendall-Taylor put it, if the intelligence suggesting that Putin will invade turns out to be wrong, “we should all be happy about that.”
Alexander Ward contributed to this report.
11. Air Force Fought Families of Texas Church Shooting Victims 'Tooth and Nail,' Lawyer Says
Has anyone or will anyone in the Air Force be held accountable?
Air Force Fought Families of Texas Church Shooting Victims 'Tooth and Nail,' Lawyer Says
It's been just over four years since Joe and Claryce Holcombe lost their son and seven other relatives from three generations of their family when a former airman stormed into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and fired more than 700 rounds, killing 26 parishioners.
Joe Holcombe said he had a "beautiful" relationship with his late son, John Bryan. They lived and worked on the family farm together. Since that tragic November day, the father has experienced "profound sadness, painful memories of the trauma, and avoidance of reminders of this loss" from the shooting, experts described in court documents.
The Holcombes' tragedy was detailed in a ruling Monday, in which a federal judge ordered the Air Force to pay more than $230 million to the survivors and families of the church shooting victims because the service failed to report the gunman's criminal history to state authorities. That history would have stopped him from buying the firearm he used to gun down the parishioners.
"The losses and pain these families have experienced is immeasurable," Judge Xavier Rodriguez of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas wrote. "Ultimately, there is no satisfying way to determine the worth of these families' pain."
Despite the Air Force admitting that a mistake had allowed the gunman, Devin P. Kelley, to fall through the cracks, the service has made it difficult for survivors and family members to get financial closure, one of the lawyers who represented the families told Military.com.
"The Air Force gave lip service, saying 'we were wrong, and we made mistakes that caused this,'" Jamal Alsaffar said. "But then fought [the survivors of the shooting] tooth and nail and tried to deny responsibility in every stage of this case."
After the 2017 shooting, Air Force officials claimed they would make immediate reforms.
That year, a Pentagon inspector general's report found that all military services "consistently" failed to submit fingerprint data for 24% of the convicted offenders reviewed.
Notably, one of the Air Force's law enforcement offices failed to report 60% of the fingerprint and final disposition reports for convicts, the review detailed.
"This was not just a one-time mistake," Alsaffar said. "The Air Force and the entire military was aware for 30 years that they were not reporting dangerous felons in the background check system."
Under federal law, Kelley shouldn't have been allowed to purchase the rifle used in the shooting because of a prior conviction of domestic assault against his wife and stepson. He received a bad conduct discharge from the Air Force in 2014.
Then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told Washington officials in 2017 that local offices were now required to loop in higher levels of command before closing criminal cases and that officers must verify that the records have been added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's database.
In 2019, the Air Force acquired a new program for crime reporting that replaced an outdated computer system that had been around since the 1990s.
Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman, declined to comment on what other policy measures have been taken to ensure such a tragedy doesn't occur again.
Stefanek, when asked about an appeal, added, "We are aware of the court's award and are reviewing the judge's ruling,"
In response, Alsaffar said, "The folks that are making this decision are the president of the United States, the Attorney General of the United States and the Department of Justice, not a media spokesperson."
In the four years since the shooting, the victims have had to relive their trauma every anniversary, for every trial and every time many of them go back to that church.
But for those parishioners who served in the military, it's knowing that the Air Force has battled them in court that really hurts.
"Quite a few of the victims who were seriously injured, one who was permanently paralyzed, and several who died in that shooting are veterans," Alsaffar said. "So, this was particularly painful for them."
12. ‘Hand of Russia’ visible in African coups says AFRICOM boss
Excerpts:
Following a question during the Feb. 3 conference regarding the number of coups and the possibility of Russian or Chinese influence, Townsend made the rare move of specifically calling out Russia for its potential involvement in Africa, amid the international focus largely highlighting the ongoing build up of tensions with Ukraine.
“We have not seen that — have not seen any involvement by the Chinese in any of these coups,” Townsend said. “With Russia, I think it’s a little less clear. I think I have received reports of Russian involvement at least in Sudan in the not too distant past.”
The October coup in Sudan is just one of four successful military coups carried out in 2021, with Chad, Mali and Guinea also facing militaristic takeovers in the last year.
‘Hand of Russia’ visible in African coups says AFRICOM boss
Speaking virtually from Rome during the recent 2022 African Chiefs of Defense Conference, U.S. Africa Command’s Gen. Stephen Townsend said that “the hand of Russia” may be present in a few of the recent coups the African continent has seen in the past year.
Following a question during the Feb. 3 conference regarding the number of coups and the possibility of Russian or Chinese influence, Townsend made the rare move of specifically calling out Russia for its potential involvement in Africa, amid the international focus largely highlighting the ongoing build up of tensions with Ukraine.
“We have not seen that — have not seen any involvement by the Chinese in any of these coups,” Townsend said. “With Russia, I think it’s a little less clear. I think I have received reports of Russian involvement at least in Sudan in the not too distant past.”
The October coup in Sudan is just one of four successful military coups carried out in 2021, with Chad, Mali and Guinea also facing militaristic takeovers in the last year.
Violence in Africa has been increasing exponentially in the past few years, especially in the Sahel, a semi-arid region crossing northern Africa between the Sahara to the north and and tropical savannas to the south, extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea across Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Eritrea.
“In 2020, the Sahel saw a 44-percent increase in violent events in the region,” Col. Daniel Kobs, 409th Air Expeditionary Group commander, said in the Air Force press release marking Chief JoAnne Bass’s December visit to U.S. troops in Niger. “The threat is real. Our partnerships in West Africa, now more than ever, are key to the counter-violent extremist organization fight. Our Airmen are critical to enabling our partner forces and building trust within the region.”
While Townsend was clear that he does not believe Russia was the driving force behind any of the coups, he specified that their involvement can likely be noted as an attributing factor.
The AFRICOM commander also specifically noted the presence of mercenaries in Mali from Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization that some believe is a direct branch of the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Despite denials from the Malian and Russian sides, Townsend said the U.S. has confirmed reports of their presence, with hundreds of Wagner members currently in-county and more potentially on the way.
“We have observed the Malian junta bring Russian mercenaries into their country,” he said. “They’ve invited them.”
Townsend said that after years of watching their efforts in Syria, Libya, Sudan and the Central African Republic, the presence of Wagner Group does not bode well for Mali as a nation.
“They never leave the situation better than they found it,” Townsend said. “My experience is they will leave it much worse and they will also exploit the country at [it’s own] expense.”
While Townsend declined to specifically state why the influx of military coups in 2021 may have occurred, he did suggest they could be attributed to a lack of — or insufficient — governance and corruption.
U.S. forces will continue to offer support to the members of the G5 Sahel Joint Force, established in 2017 to respond to the expansion of armed and violent extremist groups and to the deteriorating security situation in the region, and affected nations, Townsend said, with equipment, training, intelligence-sharing and occasional airlift and advisory support.
Speaking on Burkina Faso, Townsend said the U.S. government is waiting for neighboring countries to make a decision before moving forward with any potential American action.
Rachel is a Marine Corps veteran, Penn State alumna and Master's candidate at New York University for Business and Economic Reporting.
13. Biden’s pick to lead military in Middle East says U.S. has a ‘moral obligation’ to help Afghans left behind
Biden’s pick to lead military in Middle East says U.S. has a ‘moral obligation’ to help Afghans left behind
President Biden’s nominee to command U.S. troops across the Middle East said on Tuesday that he sees Iran’s regional influence and weapons programs as “vexing,” and that he believes America has a “moral obligation” to evacuate more Afghans who helped the United States during its longest war.
Army Lt. Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, who has deployed to the Middle East and Afghanistan throughout his career, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that if confirmed as the next commanding general of U.S. Central Command, he would assess what military options could assist the State Department in doing so.
The general’s comments came in response to a question from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who is among the lawmakers from both political parties pressing for the Biden administration to do more for the thousands of allies left behind after the Taliban swept to power in August.
“I have been frustrated, frankly, by our State Department’s seeming reluctance to be as engaged as it should in this effort,” Blumenthal said during the hearing.
Kurilla, commanding general of the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C., affirmed he would prioritize the matter.
Asked about the military’s options for carrying out counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan now that U.S. forces have withdrawn, Kurilla indicated that remained a work in progress.
“It’s resource-intensive to be able to do the finding, and then the fixing and finishing of those targets that you’re going after,” he said, adding that drones continue to fly over Afghanistan from long distances from other partner countries.
The general said that he wants to continue working with Pakistan to the extent possible. Islamabad has had an uneven and at times adversarial relationship with the United States over how to handle militant groups in the region, but Kurilla said shared interests remain.
“The humanitarian crisis inside of Afghanistan threatens the migrants to push into Pakistan,” he said, alluding to waves of refugees who already have begun to leave Afghanistan.
Tuesday’s wide-ranging hearing also touched on recent prison breaks at Islamic State detention centers in Syria, China’s global expansion and whether a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine would have implications in the Middle East.
Kurilla, who in the near term is set to lead a headquarters unit in Germany overseeing U.S. troops deployed in response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis, said he believes an invasion would likely alarm Central Asian nations like Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan that were once Soviet states.
The general said that Iran’s influence across the region continues to be troubling. He cited Tehran’s support for Houthi rebels in Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria who have launched rockets at U.S. troops. The United States, Kurilla said, must expose Iran’s involvement in such actions whenever possible.
“It causes them to react,” he said. “They try to hide their behavior and not take action for a time.”
Kurilla, 55, is expected to face little opposition to confirmation. Several lawmakers, including Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday they believe he is right for the job.
As commanding general of the XVIII Corps, Kurilla oversees more than 90,000 service members, including some of the Army’s best known units. They include the 82nd Airborne Division, the 10th Mountain Division, the 101st Airborne Division and 3rd Infantry Division.
A 1988 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., he has participated in virtually all of the military’s major campaigns since joining the Army, and served each year in the Middle East from 2004 to 2014, commanding conventional and Special Operations troops as he rose through the ranks. In 2005, as battalion commander, he was wounded in a firefight in Iraq.
Kurilla is expected to replace Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, who has led Central Command since March 2019. He is expected to retire.
14. Pro-China Twitter Accounts Flood Hashtag Critical of Beijing Winter Olympics
There is still a need for the principle of mass in the cyber domain, Fortunately (or unfortunately) this type of. mass can be automated.
WSJ News Exclusive | Pro-China Twitter Accounts Flood Hashtag Critical of Beijing Winter Olympics
Researchers say many accounts are largely automated and are meant to drown out calls by advocacy groups to boycott the Beijing Games
WSJ · by Georgia Wells and Liza Lin
China’s cabinet, the State Council and the Cyberspace Administration of China didn’t respond to requests for comment on the hashtag flooding and the origin of such accounts.
“‘The Chinese propaganda apparatus has been very focused on defending their image regarding the treatment of the Uyghur, while also promoting the Olympics.’”
— Darren Linvill of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub
In a campaign that began in late October, the largely automated accounts are posting spam-like notes that Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, professors at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, say appear intended to make the hashtag harder for activists to mobilize around.
Such a tactic, known as hashtag flooding, typically aims to dilute the effectiveness of a popular hashtag so that other Twitter users searching the term see swarms of unrelated content mixed in with announcements for coming protests or calls for other organized action.
“The Chinese propaganda apparatus has been very focused on defending their image regarding the treatment of the Uyghur, while also promoting the Olympics. This hashtag is at the nexus of those two things,” Mr. Linvill said.
In addition to making content from human-rights advocates harder to find, the flooding could also be intended to trigger Twitter’s monitoring systems as spam, in which case all related content would be removed, Messrs. Linvill and Warren said.
More than 132,000 tweets posted from Oct. 20 through Jan. 20 used the hashtag #GenocideGames, according to Messrs. Linvill and Warren. About 67% of the tweets are no longer viewable, the professors said. A spokeswoman for Twitter Inc. TWTR -0.17% said the company has taken action on some of these tweets, in line with the company’s rules against spam and platform manipulation.
The tweets are part of a network of China-backed accounts that Twitter first identified in December, the spokeswoman said.
One in 10 of the accounts the professors tracked used the hashtag #GenocideGames in the first tweet of the account’s existence, which is one indication that they were set up specifically to engage in the hashtag flooding, Mr. Linvill said.
Researchers say Chinese authorities have detained hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim minorities in a network of internment camps as part of its assimilation campaign, which they say also includes mass surveillance and forced birth control.
U.S. officials, policy makers from other Western countries and some human-rights activists have labeled Beijing’s treatment of Xinjiang’s minorities a form of genocide. China rejects the allegations and has called the camps vocational training centers to improve livelihoods and fight religious extremism and terrorism. The International Olympic Committee has protested against attempts to politicize the Beijing Olympic Games. China has said sports has nothing to do with politics and has asked countries to practice the Olympic spirit of “unity” instead of undermining its cause.
China’s government maintains tight control over the country’s domestic internet, directing social-media companies to censor subversive views. The country’s authorities have also employed an army of pro-government internet users to boost nationalistic viewpoints.
Screenshots show two of the many Twitter accounts posting the spam-like messages.
Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which researches disinformation on the internet, said past social-media campaigns that the companies believe were operated by Chinese authorities have generally promoted content to create a positive perception of the country.
Typically, the operations share and retweet certain points of view that the government wants to amplify. They use networks of accounts, often created in batches on the same day, as well as compromised accounts that once belonged to other users but are seized and used to post about topics important to the Chinese government, Ms. DiResta said.
“Topics change according to what is of interest in the news: Hong Kong protests, the election in Taiwan in 2020, Covid, Xinjiang, now—per this research—the Olympics,” Ms. DiResta said.
An analysis by The Wall Street Journal showed many accounts that appeared to latch onto the #GenocideGames hashtag sought to give the impression that they belonged to users from non-Chinese backgrounds, with names such as Erin Lockett and Isaac Churchill.
Often, the accounts retweeted subjects completely unrelated to Xinjiang or China, including romance and the National Football League, according to tweets viewed by the Journal. Seventy percent of the accounts tweeting the #GenocideGames hashtag had zero followers, according to the Clemson research.
Activists say the tactic is an effort by the Chinese government to sow confusion around the issue and promote their own explanation for what is happening in Xinjiang.
This is “one of the central strategies that the Chinese government has used over the past years,” said Peter Irwin, a senior program officer at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., that began using the hashtag in the run-up to the Beijing Games. “They’re not necessarily going to convince everybody in the West, but they’re trying to muddy the waters.”
WSJ · by Georgia Wells and Liza Lin
15. Biden Picks Replacements for Purged Naval Academy Board -- Including 2 Trailblazing Women
Biden Picks Replacements for Purged Naval Academy Board -- Including 2 Trailblazing Women
President Joe Biden has nominated six new members, including some notable names, to the U.S. Naval Academy's Board of Visitors, possibly closing the book on another leftover controversy from the Trump era.
The drama kicked off in the waning days of the Trump administration. Between then-President Donald Trump's election loss and Biden's inauguration, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller frantically removed and replaced dozens of members of various Defense Department boards, including one that oversees the Naval Academy.
The replacements were often Trump loyalists, such as senior adviser Kellyanne Conway; fundraiser and White House adviser Matt Schlapp; and impeachment attorney Pam Bondi. Many had little or no military or defense experience.
Notable names in the new batch of six appointees include Lt. Cmdr. John S. McCain IV, son of the late senator from Arizona; retired Lt. Col. Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot who was the first woman to fly a combat mission for the branch and would later unsuccessfully challenge Mitch McConnell for his Senate seat in 2020; and retired Adm. Michelle Janine Howard, a trailblazing African American female officer who rose to become the highest-ranking woman in U.S. naval history.
Biden also named retired Army Gen. John R. Allen; Dr. Paul J. Angelo; and Robert E. Clark II, a former Navy captain and president emeritus of Wesley College, to the board.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed by two former appointees to the Naval Academy board -- former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and ex-Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought -- has stalled in federal court.
The pair filed the suit several weeks after their firing, arguing in their complaint that the Biden administration did not have the legal authority to remove them. The men asked for a restraining order blocking their ousting, but a judge denied that order in December. Lawyers for the two men are now trying to keep the case from being dismissed, court records show.
-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @ktoropin.
16. Foreign reporters amazed by China’s efforts in holding Games amid pandemic, thoughtful arrangements for their work
From the Global Times in China. Propaganda.
Foreign reporters amazed by China’s efforts in holding Games amid pandemic, thoughtful arrangements for their work
By Zhang Hui globaltimes.cn3 min
Foreign journalists covering the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics were not only amazed by China's development in high technology and in winter sports, but also deeply felt China's friendliness and thoughtful arrangements for journalists, as well as its efforts to ensure safe international sports events amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some reporters interviewed by the Global Times on Monday also called on some Western media to focus on sports rather than unprofessionally politicizing the Games and smearing China, saying they should accept China's development, which is beneficial to the world.
Emre Aytekin, a journalist with Turkey's Anadolu Agency, was thrilled to have an opportunity to meet and talk to his youth hero - former NBA star Yao Ming - when reporting the torch relay on February 2.
"Yao Ming was a hero of my youth, because I played basketball. So I was very excited to meet him and ask him questions, and that was a highlight for me," Aytekin recalled his encounter with Yao, saying Yao gave him great answers.
Yao was among the first people to carry the flame as the Olympic Torch Relay began on February 2, and he was also a torchbearer ahead of the Beijing Summer Games in 2008.
Unlike some media hype that journalists were being harassed during reporting the Winter Olympics or they had to bring burner phones out of surveillance concerns, Aytekin said that he was treated well in reporting, had chances to talk to interviewees, and the organizers were very hospitable. Aytekin did not witness any check or surveillance of his phone in reporting.
Muhammad Asghar, a Pakistani journalist based in Beijing, was amazed by the grand opening ceremony, but was more touched by China's efforts to hold the Games amid the pandemic, which he said was "not an easy thing."
Asghar recalled the efficient and thoughtful arrangements that the Chinese government provided for some foreign journalists attending the ceremony on February 4.
From boarding buses and going through security checks, being provided with food, blankets and gloves, to receiving friendly guidance and warm welcomes from young volunteers, "there were not any problems and everything was smooth," he said. "There were previously many rumors spread about possible problems at the Games, but China is successfully holding the games in a very proper manner."
Apart from meeting his idol, reporting on the Beijing Games has enabled Aytekin to see the sportsmanship, energy and friendliness of China. He said he can feel China is a "people-friendly nation" through his work.
When reporting the torch relay at the Badaling section of the Great Wall on February 3, Aytekin interviewed torchbearer Yang Qian who was the winner of Team China's first gold medal at Tokyo 2020 at 21 years old.
"Yang was an Olympic champion at such a young age and when I talked to her, I found she was such a humble, honest and sweet young person. She did not only talk to journalists but to everyone - the frontline workers and firemen," he said, noting that he could see the spirit of friendliness from her.
Asghar said he visited China's Winter Olympics venues in Zhangjiakou two years ago and China has experienced big changes in developing winter sports over the years, which Pakistan should learn from.
He hopes the Games will provide a good opportunity for Pakistan to cooperate with China in developing winter sports facilities and other related sectors.
When the world is focusing on the Games, some Western media manipulated human rights issue and hyped the "diplomatic boycott" by some countries, which was neither fair nor professional, Asghar said.
He said what they should do is focus on the sports competition and acknowledge China's development.
"China has made wonderful achievements, such as in poverty alleviation, which the world is benefiting from, and China is sharing with other countries its achievements through the Belt and Road initiative," Asghar said.
17. Biden to appoint son of late Sen. John McCain to Naval Academy board
Biden to appoint son of late Sen. John McCain to Naval Academy board
The Hill · by Sarah Polus · February 7, 2022
Jack McCain, born John S. McCain IV, is among the six members appointed to the board by the president. The panel is tasked with inquiring into "the state of morale and discipline, the curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic methods, and other matters relating to the academy," according to the Naval Academy.
McCain said in a twitter post that he was "incredibly honored" and "deeply humbled" to be asked to serve in the appointment.
"I am incredibly honored and, suffice to say, deeply humbled, to have been asked to serve on the Naval Academy Board of Visitors," he wrote. "I am grateful beyond measure for the opportunity, and look forward to working to continue the proud tradition of developing Midshipmen."
McCain is a reserve naval aviator for Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 85 and is a graduate of the Naval Academy, as was his father.
Biden also intends to appoint retired Gen. John R. Allen, Paul J. Angelo, retired Navy Officer Robert E. Clark, retired Adm. Michelle Janine Howard and retired Lt. Col. Amy McGrath.
Other appointees to the board are made by the vice president, the Speaker of the House, and the House and Senate Armed Services committees.
McCain flew back from serving in Afghanistan for five days to observe his father's funeral in August 2018 then returned to Afghanistan for eight more months, according to The Washington Post.
“I can tell in the pictures — especially in the pictures at first in Arizona — that I was shell-shocked,” he said. “Obviously, I was tired, but it wasn’t just tired. It was getting snatched out of a war zone and getting thrown back into this media and family bubble. It was an intense experience,” he told The Post one year after his father's death.
The Hill · by Sarah Polus · February 7, 2022
18. FDD | China, Russia, and Iran Hold Trilateral Naval Drill
FDD | China, Russia, and Iran Hold Trilateral Naval Drill
fdd.org · by Bradley Bowman CMPP Senior Director · February 8, 2022
February 8, 2022 | Policy Brief
The exercise’s stated purpose was to focus on anti-air, counter-piracy, and nighttime maritime operation skills — fairly standard objectives for maritime exercises. It was clear, however, that the exercise had a larger purpose for the three governments, which are unified in their opposition to the United States.
Similarly, Iran’s spokesperson for the exercise claimed the drills were important for maintaining security and navigation through vital waterways. This is despite the fact that Tehran and its terrorist proxies have routinely threatened or even attacked civilian and military vessels in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb Strait, Strait of Hormuz, and Persian Gulf. Iranian officials have also increasingly extolled the centrality of the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz to “global competition” in the coming decade.
Political rhetoric aside, the Chinese and Russian contributions to the exercise were relatively modest. China’s participation consisted of a guided missile destroyer and a replenishment ship, while Russia contributed a missile cruiser, a destroyer, and a replenishment ship.
Iran’s contribution, however, was more robust. Both of Iran’s naval services — the Artesh Navy and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Navy (IRGC-N) — participated in the drill. The Artesh Navy reportedly contributed 11 vessels, including two frigates, a corvette, and a fast-attack craft, while the IRGC-N added several smaller ships and helicopters.
The drill is not the first Chinese-Russian-Iranian exercise. It follows a similar exercise conducted at the end of 2019 near the Gulf of Oman amidst ongoing tensions between Tehran and Washington.
This increasing security cooperation reflects and reinforces closer relations among the three governments. In September, the Chinese- and Russian-dominated Shanghai Cooperation Organisation agreed to grant full membership to Iran, which had previously held observer status. Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein visited China last month to deepen the “comprehensive strategic partnership” agreement the two countries signed last year.
While the terms of that agreement have not been officially disclosed, a leaked copy labeled “final version” called for China and Iran to conduct combined military training, exercises, weapons development, and intelligence sharing. Tehran and Beijing are already making good on the commitment to conduct more military exercises together. The other elements may follow.
Tehran’s ultra-hardline administration is eager to strengthen relations with China in order to obtain political, economic, and military support to counter U.S.-led sanctions and to bolster Iran’s stature and military capabilities. With growing support from Beijing, Tehran will be less likely to make the sort of concessions necessary for a worthwhile nuclear agreement and may pursue even more aggressive policies in the region.
As the Biden administration finalizes its National Defense Strategy, it should not ignore the growing alignment among America’s great power and rogue state adversaries.
Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow and where Ryan Brobst and Zane Zovak are research analysts. They all contribute to FDD’s Iran Program and China Program. For more analysis from the authors, CMPP, and the Iran and China programs, please subscribe HERE. Follow Bradley on Twitter @Brad_L_Bowman. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CMPP and @FDD_Iran. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Bradley Bowman CMPP Senior Director · February 8, 2022
19. Germany must implement its ban of Hezbollah terror activities
Germany must implement its ban of Hezbollah terror activities
Chancellor Olaf Scholz should order the arrest of all of the terrorist movement’s members and shut down its mosques and associations in the Federal Republic.
(February 7, 2022 / JNS) To great fanfare, Berlin announced in April 2020 that it outlawed all activities of the Lebanese terrorist movement Hezbollah within the territory of the Federal Republic. However, the ban remains a dead letter because Germany and its 16 states largely refuse to enforce it.
According to a 2021 intelligence report from the state of Lower Saxony’s domestic intelligence agency, the number of Hezbollah’s supporters and members in Germany rose from 1,050 in 2019 to 1,250 in 2020. Despite the ban, Germany has not arrested them. Note that a mere three Hezbollah operatives managed to blow up a tour bus in Bulgaria in 2012, resulting in the murder of five Israelis and their Bulgarian Muslim bus driver.
Hezbollah remains a deadly threat to Jews and Israelis in Europe.
Richard Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany who was largely responsible for impelling Berlin to pass its anti-Hezbollah ban, tweeted in June 2021: “It’s good the Germans moved last year to outlaw Hezbollah, despite the E.U.’s inaction. The German government now has more legal tools to shut Hezbollah down and arrest its supporters.”
The pressing question is: Will Germany and its constituent states use their new legal and counter-terrorism tools to crack down on Hezbollah’s activities?
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Take the disturbing example of the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, where Hezbollah stored ammonium nitrate and currently has 75 active operatives, according to the state’s most recent intelligence report.
Hezbollah terrorists have used ammonium nitrate to plot bomb attacks in Argentina, Britain, Bulgaria, Cyprus and France, and the same explosive material destroyed the Beirut port in August 2020, killing 218 people, wounding more than 7,000 others, leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless and causing more than $15 billion in property damage.
In September 2020, Timur Lutfullin, a parliamentary advisor for the Free Democratic Party in the Baden-Württemberg state government, contacted me and noted that he along with two politicians “prepared the initiative … regarding Hezbollah activities in Baden-Württemberg.”
The initiative came in the form of a questionnaire that sought answers from the state’s government about how Hezbollah was able to store explosive materials in Baden-Württemberg and what the state was doing to combat the terrorist organization.
Lutfullin added, “We would like to continue [with] the issue in the public [sphere] and to grow the pressure on our government.”
The sense of urgency about Hezbollah’s activities in Baden-Württemberg has intensified since it was revealed that Michael Blume, the state’s commissioner tasked with fighting anti-Semitism, has promoted via likes and retweets a Twitter account run by Axel Mylius, a reportedly German anti-Semite who a launched radical Islamist initiative in Berlin. Mylius is a former “great friend” (and likely still a supporter) of Hezbollah’s chief financial sponsor and ally—the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Documents show how Mylius, using the name “Omar Mylius,” celebrated the Islamic Republic’s anti-Semitic 1979 Islamic Revolution at a commemoration event held at Tehran’s embassy in Berlin. Mylius is deemed anti-Semitic by the Vienna-based think tank Mena-Watch.
Mylius’s Twitter account has compared Israelis Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan, Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fascists, clear examples of contemporary anti-Semitism. Blume did not object to the comparisons when sent press queries; he also went silent about the dangers posed by the terrorist entity Hezbollah in Baden-Württemberg.
All of this helps to explain why the prominent Jewish human-rights organization the Simon Wiesenthal Center included Blume on its “Top 10” list of the worst outbreaks of global anti-Semitism for 2021.
Blume, wrote Wiesenthal, “has continued since 2019 social-media activity where he ‘Liked’ a Facebook posting comparing Zionists to Nazis. He has since continued to ‘Like’ and retweet anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and conspiratorial Twitter accounts.”
Daniel S. Mariaschin, B’nai B’rith International CEO, said of Blume: “It is distressing that a public official entrusted with fighting anti-Semitism would ‘Like’ Facebook comparisons of Zionism to Nazism, not speak out against a bank that counts amongst its clients an organization dedicated to delegitimizing Israel, and not call for an end of relations between Freiburg and an Iranian regime that issues genocidal calls for Israel’s elimination.”
The city of Freiburg in Baden-Württemberg is helping to mainstream both Iran—the worst state-sponsor of terrorism and anti-Semitism, according to the U.S. government—and Iran’s proxy Hezbollah.
Mariaschin added that “this appears to be another example of the convenience of taking aim at Israel with no penalty. Contemporary anti-Semitism is very much about the campaign to demonize the Jewish state. Understanding that reality should very much be a requirement for holding a position intended to call out those who engage in this kind of blatant defamation.”
Michael Wolffsohn, a distinguished German-Jewish historian and commentator on modern anti-Semitism, told the Swiss daily NZZ that Blume promotes the cause of anti-Semites.
“Hence my simplified conclusion: Blume is a useful idiot of anti-Semites,” said Wolffsohn.
Henryk M. Broder, a best-selling author and a columnist for Die Welt, said Blume is not a classical anti-Semite, but he “relativizes anti-Semitism.” Broder has testified to a Bundestag panel on modern Jew-hatred in Germany.
Blume should be dismissed from his post because he continued to ignore the Hezbollah threat in his state. Equally disturbing, Baden-Württemberg’s Interior Minister Thomas Strobl and Gov. Winfried Kretschmann are enabling Blume’s attacks on Jews and Israel, and refusing to clamp down on Hezbollah.
Hans-Ulrich Rülke, a member of the state legislature in Baden-Württemberg from the Free Democratic Party, said “Strobl must finally act and prevent Hezbollah-affiliated organizations from inviting hate preachers to Baden-Württemberg and collecting money for terrorist purposes.”
Hezbollah’s activities are not limited to Baden-Württemberg. The terrorist organization’s members and network crisscross the Central European country. There are 180 Hezbollah members and supporters in the state of Lower Saxony, up 20 from 2019.
If Germany were at all serious about its prohibition of Hezbollah activities, Chancellor Olaf Scholz would order the arrest of all of the terrorist movement’s members and shut down its mosques and associations in the Federal Republic.
Benjamin Weinthal is a research fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow Benjamin on Twitter @BenWeinthal.
20. Dear Olympics Media: Please Spare Us Your Fawning Over China's Digital Surveillance
Good advice. You are feeding the Chinese propaganda machine.
Dear Olympics Media: Please Spare Us Your Fawning Over China's Digital Surveillance
Reason · by Andrea O'Sullivan · February 8, 2022
Regarding the authoritarian country's central bank digital currency, you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them.”
| 2.8.2022 8:30 AM
(ANP Sport / ANP/Sipa USA/Newscom)
The Olympics are here again! So soon? It's not your imagination: the 2020 games in Japan wrapped up in 2021 due to COVID postponement. And speaking of COVID, the 2022 games are in China. The Chinese Communist Party is certainly hoping to spiff up their image after these bruising past two years, and I don't just mean through the impressive spectacles during the festivities itself.
The CCP wants to dazzle the world with its sparkling digital panopticons, the crown jewel being its "central bank digital currency," or CBDC. China's government-controlled digital yuan, also called e-CNY, has been in the making for several years and will be "premiering globally" during the Olympics. The CCP is hoping that foreign journalists will marvel at the efficiency and speed of such a centralized payment system. Unfortunately, I expect much of the Western press to gobble it up.
It started happening well before the opening ceremony. One glowing preview in Fortune talks about how the digital yuan will "broaden financial inclusion and promote equitable growth." The author uncritically repeats the People's Bank of China's (PBOC) arguments that the government will be a better steward of user data than popular private payment apps WeChat Pay and Alipay. Without skipping a beat, he goes on to write that PBOC will collect "real-time data on the creation, bookkeeping, and circulation of money" to better help "set monetary policy." The conclusion: the digital yuan should "become a model" for other countries.
But for whatever reason, the Chinese just aren't that into the digital yuan. Official PBOC figures estimate that some $13.68 billion in transactions have occurred since e-CNY debuted two years ago. That's chicken feed in China. For comparison, Alipay alone handles some $1.5 trillion in payments on average each month.
Chinese consumers are famously cool with digital payments. They more or less decided to go cashless on their own. Around 90 percent of all Chinese transactions are routed through WeChat Pay or Alipay. It's just easier—scan a code, push a button, end of transaction. Throw in how essential an app like WeChat is for daily Chinese life and it's easy to see how digital payments have become so ingrained in China.
The CCP must have thought it would be easy to convince Chinese consumers to switch over to their patriotic alternative. Good on citizens for ignoring it. Say what you will about the close party connections of the centralized all-inclusive data repositories that are Alipay and WeChat Pay, at least these companies are not literally the government.
Actually, China has been undergoing its own "war on big tech" for some time. Although many in the West view Chinese companies as de facto extensions of the Chinese state, the CCP has been cracking down on tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent, who respectively own Alipay and WeChat. As evidenced by the PBOC's negative comments about the payment giants' data practices, the CCP sees the digital yuan at least partly as a way to wrest control from private tech companies.
So now we come to the Olympics and the Chinese CBDC's big international debut. Maybe some global googly eyes can inspire some new enthusiasm for the government's dud of a digital currency.
Athletes and staff in the Olympic Village will have just three options to make payments: cash, Visa, and the digital yuan. To use e-CNY, visitors can use a kiosk to convert their local currency into the digital yuan which is then loaded on a debit card. Then you just use the card like any other. The PBOC wants to sweeten up the deal a bit, so they've made wearables like smart watches, ski gloves, and Olympic pins that can be loaded with the currency and scanned to make payments.
Alas, China has been a bit hoisted by its own petard. COVID-19 isolation rules are pouring cold water on the country's plans for a big digital yuan splash. Limiting the number of fans who can attend the games necessarily limits the number of people who can be exposed to the hottest innovations in Chinese spyware.
And it's not like the American government is unaware of the intentions here. Officials have warned athletes not to use the digital yuan because of the surveillance risk. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee has urged Team USA to just ditch their phones altogether and bring a burner instead. It's not bad advice. (The "bad advice" title goes to Rep. Nancy Pelosi's confusing exhortation for athletes to condemn Chinese human rights abuses while not making the CCP mad.)
When it comes to China, many in the West feel these kinds of government expansions "can't happen here." Well, CBDCs are hardly a Chinese phenomenon. Most governments in the West are considering or actively developing their own digital currencies to impose on the population. Just last week, the Boston Fed put out an exploratory paper on their "Project Hamilton" to develop a "high-performance and resilient transaction processor for a CBDC." China's CBDC started with an exploratory paper, too.
If you want a fast, reliable, secure, borderless global payment system, we already have bitcoin. If you want it to be private, too, there are ways to do that (or you can use Monero). There is no need for the government to get involved. Unless you support the government—then you want them to have all the power they want.
Keep this in mind if you see any Olympics journalists fawning over China's digital yuan. It's not the efficiency that impresses them—plenty of cryptocurrencies do that. It's the state control.
Andrea O'Sullivan is the Director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Fla. Her work focuses on emerging technologies, cryptocurrency, surveillance, and the open internet.
Reason · by Andrea O'Sullivan · February 8, 2022
20. Heritage Foundation, former powerhouse of GOP policy, adjusts in face of new competition from Trump allies
Heritage Foundation, former powerhouse of GOP policy, adjusts in face of new competition from Trump allies
The Washington Post · by Jeff Stein and Yeganeh Torbati Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST · February 7, 2022
The Heritage Foundation has long shaped mainstream Republican policy in Washington. It drafted much of Ronald Reagan’s agenda to slash federal spending and launched a ferocious campaign to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
But in recent months, the venerable think tank in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol has revamped its leadership after its former president, Kay Coles James, was subject to a torrent of criticism from a prominent conservative cable host. Heritage replaced James with a Texas firebrand more determined to fight pandemic restrictions, critical race theory in schools, and “teaching transgenderism to kindergartners,” bending the institution toward issues that have resonated with former president Donald Trump and his allies.
The leadership changes mark a retreat from traditional but stodgy fiscal and foreign policy issues in favor of the hot-button education and vaccine debates that increasingly define the Republican Party in the era of Trump. The change also comes as Heritage is struggling to compete for right-wing dollars while new think tanks are cropping up around town, including several launched by such Trump acolytes as former White House budget chief Russ Vought and top domestic policy aide Brooke Rollins.
Under James, who led Heritage until last year, the foundation clashed with Trump allies over the killing of George Floyd, policies toward Big Tech, and the massive explosion of federal spending under Trump. Frequently attacked by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, James announced in March that she soon would be stepping down. The new director, Kevin Roberts, most recently led the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. He told the Heritage news organization, the Daily Signal, that his top three priorities at Heritage are “education, education, and education.”
The change at the top also more closely aligns the leadership of the Heritage Foundation with the views of several members of its board of trustees, who believed that James had not moved aggressively enough to position Heritage as opposed to coronavirus-related government restrictions at the outset of the pandemic, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter.
“Shouting out Reagan platitudes in 2020 is not what you want to hear, and Kevin gets all that,” said one conservative strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss the situation.
In an interview, Roberts strongly disputed that Heritage would be less focused on economic and fiscal issues, pointing to existing and upcoming work with GOP lawmakers on that topic.
Rob Bluey, Heritage’s chief spokesman, said James’s decision to leave her post in 2021 was “totally her choice.” A spokesman for James, who now serves in the Cabinet of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and remains a Heritage trustee, did not respond to requests for comment.
Heritage’s sway over the Republican Party has dramatically weakened, in part because of how Trump changed the party.
The coronavirus also proved a divisive force within the building. In the early days of the pandemic in spring 2020, Heritage leadership under James rejected an article from one of its scholars denouncing government restrictions, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Heritage’s offices stayed closed for about three months, and signs urging masking became something of a joke for many conservatives who mocked the concept.
“Heritage came around to opposing the lockdowns later, but at the beginning the idea was, ‘Let’s not attack lockdowns,’ ” one person familiar with the matter said. “It was very controversial inside the building.”
By contrast, under the leadership of Roberts, the Texas Public Policy Foundation reopened two weeks after the coronavirus first hit. Roberts said he was one of the most outspoken members of Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-Tex.) pandemic “state strike force” in pushing for an end to coronavirus-related restrictions. By April 3, 2020, the Texas Public Policy Foundation was already warning that the isolation orders were far more dangerous than the pandemic.
“I was among the most outspoken that the shutdowns were awful — that they were worse than the disease itself,” Roberts told The Washington Post in an interview. “And I am sorry to report that I was 100 percent right.”
Bluey said in an email to The Post that the institution “has consistently opposed government lockdowns,” pointing to a set of April 2020 recommendations that said state and local leaders should quickly reopen businesses and schools “except in communities where an outbreak is occurring or believed to be imminent.” Later Heritage reports criticized a model used to justify coronavirus restrictions and focused on their economic consequences.
Roberts’s opinion is widely shared among conservative cable news hosts and many Republican politicians. The pandemic has killed more than 900,000 Americans.
Heritage now finds itself trying to catch up after watching some of its core tenets become shredded during Trump’s tenure.
Even as Heritage staffers cycled into the federal government to staff the Trump administration, the think tank found itself repeatedly at odds with then-President Trump’s allies. Heritage officials have long decried big government deficits, but Trump added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt, the most by any president. Trump also imposed enormously controversial tariffs on foreign countries, while Heritage has long advocated free trade. Trump took direct aim at the Silicon Valley giants who donate heavily to conservative causes, and Heritage experts criticized Trump’s attacks on China.
Carlson, a Trump ally and arguably the most influential conservative voice in the country, often led the charge. In 2019, Carlson said Heritage “no longer represents the interest of conservatives, at least on the question of tech,” and criticized a Heritage report that rejected government intervention that would punish tech companies for removing conservative speech.
In 2020, Carlson included James in a roundup of conservative leaders who “joined the left’s chorus” in not strongly enough denouncing violence and property destruction at protests of the murder of George Floyd. James, who is Black, wrote an op-ed for the Fox News website in May 2020 saying that she does “not condone the violence spreading across this country in response to Floyd’s horrific killing.” She also condemned the “ugly racism that stains our nation’s history and afflicts us like a cancer of the soul.”
Carlson called the op-ed a “long screed denouncing America as an irredeemably racist nation,” and he urged Heritage donors to direct their dollars elsewhere.
In August 2021, months after James had announced her resignation, Carlson aired a segment accusing Heritage of taking money from powerful tech companies, a claim the group called “patently false,” citing James’s rejection of Facebook and Google donations in 2020.
“We agree with Tucker Carlson on many issues, including his concerns about Big Tech,” Bluey said, adding that the think tank applauds Carlson “for his pursuit of the truth when so many others are afraid to ask tough questions.” Carlson declined to comment.
Heritage’s evolution comes after former top Trump aides started rival think tanks competing for conservative dollars.
Vought, the former budget chief in the Trump White House, started a group called the Center for Renewing America, which is focused on opposing voter fraud, Big Tech and critical race theory.
Another former senior Trump official, Brooke Rollins, launched the America First Policy Institute with former Trump senior aides Larry Kudlow, Chad Wolf and Linda McMahon. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, joined the Conservative Partnership Institute started by former Heritage president Jim DeMint, after leaving the administration. One former Trump official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to frankly describe the state of the party, said the “red meat” among Republicans is now issues such as school choice and opposing vaccine mandates, with the economic issues that Heritage used to focus on existing in a second tier.
Heritage’s biggest name among former Trump officials is former vice president Mike Pence, now reviled within the Trump wing of the GOP for his refusal to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“People do not walk around in fear of the Heritage Foundation the way they did 10 years ago,” said Avik Roy, a former health-care policy adviser to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank. “Heritage’s model, or self-conception, is that it gets to define what is conservative and everyone else has to fall in line. Particularly if you think about how Trump disrupted what it means to be a conservative, Heritage is no longer in a position to be a party-line enforcer.”
Added Jane Calderwood, who served as chief of staff to former senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), of Heritage: “They were a big player, and anything they said was considered gospel by certain people. … Now it’s just whatever Trump wants, he gets.”
Roberts, the new Heritage president, downplayed these challenges in an interview and stressed that he and other Heritage officials are in close communication with senior GOP officials in crafting the party’s agenda. A spokesman for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), the House GOP minority leader, said Heritage remains involved with McCarthy’s office on policy and on oversight measures related to the Biden administration.
The think tank is positioning itself to play a key role in the emerging flash points for the party. Roberts has made clear in several interviews that he views cultural questions — including over education and critical race theory — as top priorities. He has talked critically of Silicon Valley, after Carlson chastised James for being allegedly too soft on Big Tech. He has defined a “movement conservative” as someone who opposes same-sex marriage. “There’s another group of conservatives who are not movement conservatives, because they are weak and wrong on the social issues. Marriage, transgender stuff,” Roberts said.
Roberts insisted that economic policy remains “crucial” to the think tank’s mission and said that he was personally involved in crafting an economic blueprint likely to be released soon.
“Those are tensions inside the movement, and to the extent that Heritage reflects the movement, yeah, we have those tensions. But there’s a whole series of worse situations than the word ‘tension,’ ” Roberts said. “I believe in creative conflict.”
The Washington Post · by Jeff Stein and Yeganeh Torbati Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST · February 7, 2022
21. Erik Prince Helped Raise Money for Conservative Spy Venture
Sigh...
Erik Prince Helped Raise Money for Conservative Spy Venture
New details reveal the ambitions of an operation intended to infiltrate opponents of Donald Trump, including moderate Republicans as well as progressives and Democrats.
Erik Prince, founder of the private military firm Blackwater, helped raise money for a political-intelligence operation run by Richard Seddon, a former British spy.Credit...Jeenah Moon/Reuters
Feb. 8, 2022
WASHINGTON — During the summer of 2018, as Richard Seddon, a former British spy, was trying to launch a new venture to use undercover agents to infiltrate progressive groups, Democratic campaigns and other opponents of President Donald J. Trump, he turned for help to a longtime friend and former colleague: Erik Prince, the private military contractor.
Mr. Prince took on the role of celebrity pitchman, according to interviews and documents, raising money for Mr. Seddon’s spying operation, which was aimed at gathering dirt that could discredit politicians and activists in several states. After Mr. Prince and Mr. Seddon met in August 2018 with Susan Gore, a Wyoming heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune, Ms. Gore became the project’s main benefactor.
Mr. Prince’s role in the effort, which has not been previously disclosed, sheds further light on how a group of ultraconservative Republicans employed spycraft to try to manipulate the American political landscape. Mr. Prince — a former C.I.A. contractor who is best known as the founder of the private military firm Blackwater and whose sister, Betsy DeVos, was Mr. Trump’s education secretary — has drawn scrutiny over the years for Blackwater’s record of violence around the world and his subsequent ventures training and arming foreign forces.
His willingness to support Mr. Seddon’s operation is fresh evidence of his engagement in political espionage projects at home during a period when he was an informal adviser to Trump administration officials.
Mr. Seddon’s recruitment of Mr. Prince to help him secure funding is just one of the new details about Mr. Seddon’s operation revealed in documents obtained by The Times and interviews with people familiar with his plans. They provide additional insight into the ambition of the operation to use undercover operatives to target Republicans seen as insufficiently conservative, as well as to, as one document describes it, “research, penetrate and infiltrate the radical left networks.”
The Times previously reported that, in 2016 and 2017, Mr. Prince recruited Mr. Seddon to join the conservative group Project Veritas to teach espionage skills to its operatives and manage its undercover operations. Mr. Prince also allowed Project Veritas to use his family’s Wyoming ranch for training. Mr. Seddon launched his privately funded spying effort after leaving Project Veritas in 2018.
It is unclear how many potential donors Mr. Prince might have approached for money for Mr. Seddon’s venture besides Ms. Gore. Separately, Ms. Gore unsuccessfully tried to raise money for the project from Foster Friess, a billionaire Wyoming businessman, during a January 2019 meeting, three people said.
During the 2018 meeting with Ms. Gore, according to one person familiar with it, Mr. Prince and Mr. Seddon said the goal of the private spying operation was to gather dirt both on Democrats and “RINOs” — slang in conservative circles for “Republicans in name only.” The plan was to begin in Wyoming, they said, and expand operations from there.
Over two years, Mr. Seddon’s undercover operatives also developed networks in Colorado and Arizona, and made thousands of dollars in campaign donations posing as Democrats, both to the Democratic National Committee and individual campaigns. Funneling money surreptitiously to campaigns through other donors — known as straw man donations — would violate federal campaign finance laws.
Mr. Prince is separately under investigation by the Justice Department on unrelated matters, according to people familiar with the case. The scope of that investigation is unclear.
Mr. Prince declined to comment. Mr. Seddon and Ms. Gore did not respond to messages.
The documents give new details about efforts to manipulate the politics of Wyoming. While the state is currently solidly Republican, Mr. Seddon and Ms. Gore believed it was in danger of turning toward the Democrats, as Colorado has.
One target in particular was Gov. Mark Gordon, who was viewed as a RINO in some Wyoming conservative circles.
After Mr. Gordon won a close Republican primary battle against Mr. Friess, the billionaire, in August 2018, Mr. Friess blamed his loss on Democrats switching parties on Election Day to vote for Mr. Gordon.
“It seems like the Democrats have figured out this party switch deal to their advantage,” Mr. Friess wrote in an email obtained by Wyofile, a political news site in Wyoming. He added, “With Trump getting 70 percent of the vote, it shows how the Democrats have been able to control our elections with putting on a Republican coat.”
Mr. Gordon took office in January 2019. A document that month said that Mr. Seddon’s operatives had “identified three potential sources in the new governor’s administration and have begun accelerated cultivations with a view to early recruitment.”
Later in January, the operatives wrote that they had “successfully recruited another source with a role in the new governor’s administration,” adding that the “source has agreed to provide insights, help expose corruption and assist with eventual placement of undercovers.”
According to the documents, Mr. Seddon’s operatives also aimed to dig up information on Steve Harshman, the Republican speaker of the House in Wyoming at the time, who was also seen by some conservatives as not sufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump. One February 2019 report said that a “new undercover will be joining the team” and tasked with targeting Mr. Harshman.
Months later, in June 2019, a report said “we are expecting a big haul, including new lines of intelligence on the Republican side of the house.”
The documents also show that, beyond Ms. Gore, other prominent Republicans in Wyoming were involved in Mr. Seddon’s spying operation.
One of the documents indicates that Marti Halverson, a former Wyoming state lawmaker, provided a list of people for the operatives to target. The list included John Cox, then the director of the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services, and Scott Talbott, then the director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. The document is dated December 2018 and said that Mr. Talbott was “another of the names of corrupt individuals from Marti.”
Reached by phone, Ms. Halverson said: “Frankly, I have nothing to say on the subject.” She then hung up.
James O’Keefe, a conservative activist, founded Project Veritas. Mr. Prince and former British spy Richard Seddon both did work for the organization.
Mr. Seddon used other former Project Veritas employees to help with the Wyoming operation, including James Artherton, a British operative code-named “kimchi” who was involved in a Project Veritas plan targeting an editor for The New York Times in London in 2017.
One of the undercover operatives also got a job working for a consortium of wealthy liberal donors — the Wyoming Investor Network — which had made a strategic decision to support Republican moderate candidates over those more closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s agenda, the documents say. The job put her in a position to gain valuable information about which Republican candidates the group was supporting with independent advertising.
Mr. Prince has previously been involved in trying to find dirt on Democratic politicians. In 2016, Republican operatives believed they had obtained deleted Hillary Clinton emails from the dark web, and sought Mr. Prince’s assistance to authenticate them, an episode investigated by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Trump-era Russia inquiry.
The special counsel’s report said that Mr. Prince “provided funding to hire a tech adviser to ascertain the authenticity of the emails. According to Prince, the tech adviser determined that the emails were not authentic.”
Later that year, Mr. Prince turned to Mr. Seddon to help train the Project Veritas operatives. The two men had known each other since Mr. Prince’s days running Blackwater, and shared an affinity for guns and the American West. Mr. Seddon owns a cabin that he keeps stocked with guns, food and other supplies as preparation for a cataclysmic event in the United States.
During a meeting in a Las Vegas suburb last April of employees of Ms. Gore’s organization, the Wyoming Liberty Group, Mr. Seddon pitched a proposal to build a website where other so-called preppers could buy their own supplies and communicate with each other in the event of what he called a “Black Swan” moment — a major terrorist attack, another pandemic or a civil war.
Ms. Gore ended up rejecting the proposal because it was too expensive — people with knowledge of the plan said it would start in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
22. Biden's Syria strike is an important win — but underscores the folly of leaving Afghanistan
Biden's Syria strike is an important win — but underscores the folly of leaving Afghanistan
The Hill · by Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, opinion contributors · February 8, 2022
Last Thursday’s successful targeting of ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi has been trumpeted by President Biden as “testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they try to hide anywhere in the world.” Some pundits have gone even further: declaring that the raid is proof positive that a combination of U.S. military and intelligence over-the-horizon capabilities can effectively eliminate terrorist threats and keep the homeland safe.
Both are wishful thinking that ignore key differences between the killing of al-Qurashi and that of Osama bin Laden a decade ago. Moreover, the undeniable success achieved by U.S. special operations in northern Syria would be extremely difficult to replicate in Afghanistan precisely because of the U.S.’s withdrawal last August. Lost in the details of the latest successful assassination: According to sources, the raiding party flew from an existing U.S. special operations forces base in Syria, where the United States maintains a modest military presence in a largely withdrawn role. The strike targeting Qurashi was not a so-called “over-the-horizon” strike. It was actually the exact opposite.
America’s advantages in Syria — where there is an ongoing, albeit modest, U.S. military presence — compared to Afghanistan are manifold. Even in the Levant, where the U.S. has treaty relations with two countries bordering Syria — Turkey and Jordan — a combination of problematical relations even among two members of the same alliance (NATO) and the limited airborne range of helicopters limited U.S planning options. Fortunately, the small footprint manned by some 900 U.S. military personnel in northern Syria obviated the need for the Biden administration to request territorial access to either the country.
In Turkey’s case, longstanding policy disagreements over the Syrian civil war, security arrangements there, and American support of Kurdish forces, made requesting Ankara’s assistance a “mission impossible.” The ever-obliging Abdullah, King of Jordan, may have been less reluctant to help the U.S. but the flight path was just too distant to accommodate the rapid insertion and safe extraction of the raiding party.
A second key asset, which the administration credited with the mission’s success, was the help provided by local, on-the-ground, indigenous assets in the Syrian Democratic Forces. These Kurdish fighters, whom the U.S. has worked with and supported throughout the coalition campaign to defeat ISIS between 2014 and 2019, were lauded for the critical assistance they provided — presumably with human-sourced intelligence and eyes-and-ears on the ground as well as backup firepower, if needed. The group remains an extraordinarily reliable and capable partner — a luxury the U.S. now conspicuously lacks in Afghanistan.
And, the final, perhaps essential element was the excellent, precise intelligence that both pinpointed al-Qurashi’s location and determined that the wheel-chair bound ISIS commander would be present when the raiders descended. The intelligence, in fact, was so good that the raiders knew to evacuate a civilian family living on the first floor — thus adhering to the administration’s call to always prioritize civilian lives. It was likely “all-source” — acquired from technical means (communications intercepts and satellite imagery), human sources (from Kurdish and U.S. agents and informants), and acquired from drones. Although drones can travel further and longer than helicopters, close proximity to a target increases their critical ability to “loiter” above a target for long periods of time — as opposed to deploying aircraft from Qatar, when the distance then greatly diminishes its ability to remain over Afghan air space.
On the contrary, in the case of Afghanistan, the U.S. no longer has any in-country bases from which to operate. The U.S. now cannot even count on any of Afghanistan’s neighboring countries to avail such facilities for a military operation, has no indigenous, local allies from which to acquire intelligence. The U.S. would be hard-pressed because of time and distance to flood any target space with drone surveilliance. The “Zero Dark Thirty” option was therefore off the table.
In addition to distance and speed, weather was crucial. Although the attack plan was presented to Biden a month ago, winter conditions and visibility issues repeatedly thwarted its execution. Afghanistan’s even more formidable climate and geography thus are an immense added complication to any long-distance “over-the-horizon” strike.
The strike earlier this week was an important victory for the Biden administration, who’s national security record was blighted by the Afghanistan withdrawal, Houthi dominance in Yemen and escalating tensions with Russia. But, it does not vindicate the decision to depart Afghanistan, nor does it prove the promise of “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism.
On the contrary, it should stand as testament to the value of an enduring, elite counterterrorism presence in unstable areas plagued by terrorist groups. The success of this strike does not at all change the fact that such missions will be exceedingly difficult in Afghanistan — where the U.S. now lacks a presence, and therefore has no basing, no proximity and likely significantly crippled intelligence capabilities.
And, therefore, the strike underscores why maintaining this modest American military and intelligence presence in Syria and Iraq in the long-term is indeed prudent.
Bruce Hoffman is the senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University.
Jacob Ware is a research associate for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Hill · by Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, opinion contributors · February 8, 2022
23. N. Korea increases virus budget after partial border opening
Will the regime accept vaccines?
Excerpts:
The border reopening possibly shows the North is exploring more sustainable ways to deal with the coronavirus threat that may go on for years. It could also provide glimpse into the North’s plans for vaccines against COVID-19.
North Korea so far has shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because those have international monitoring requirements. But some experts say the North may still seek the help of China and Russia to provide regular testing and vaccinations of workers and troops in border areas, where access from other regions will be tightly restricted.
N. Korea increases virus budget after partial border opening
AP · by KIM TONG-HYUNG · February 8, 2022
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea plans to increase its government spending on pandemic measures by one-third this year to carry out leader Kim Jong Un’s calls for a more “advanced and people-oriented” virus response, state media said Tuesday.
The budget plans were passed during a session of Pyongyang’s rubber-stamp parliament on Sunday and Monday, which came weeks after the North tentatively restarted its railroad freight traffic with China following two years of extreme border closures and economic decay.
Kim had hinted at broader changes to the country’s pandemic response during a political conference in December, when he called for a transition toward advanced anti-virus measures based on a “scientific foundation.”
The Korean Central News Agency said North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly passed plans to increase spending on anti-virus measures by 33.3% compared to last year. The report didn’t describe those spending plans in monetary terms.
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Kim Tok Hun, premier of North Korea’s Cabinet, a key institution handling economic policies, described the North’s pandemic response as the top priority in state affairs, but also that the measures will be “put on a scientific basis to guarantee the security of the country and the people,” KCNA said.
It appeared Kim Jong Un did not attend the parliamentary session and state media didn’t mention any comments by senior officials toward Washington or Seoul amid a deepening diplomatic freeze.
Kim in recent political speeches has vowed to further bolster his nuclear arsenal. KCNA said 15.9% of the North’s total government spending last year was invested in the nuclear weapons program and the same percentage of its budget this year would go to expanding military capabilities.
Cheong Seong-Chang, an analyst at South Korea’s private Sejong Institute, said North Korea’s description of its budget clearly reflected its plans to gradually expand trade and other exchanges with China, its main ally and economic lifeline, while reshaping its virus response. He said the North could possibly adopt China’s approach of sealing certain regions to stem transmissions, instead of locking down its entire country.
North Korea still claims to have a perfect record in keeping out COVID-19 from its territory — a claim widely doubted. But the closure of its border to nearly all trade and visitors for two years further shocked an economy already damaged by decades of mismanagement and crippling U.S.-led sanctions over Kim’s nuclear weapons and missile program.
The North’s resumption of railroad freight traffic with China last month came between a flurry of missile tests clearly aimed at pressuring the Biden administration over stalled nuclear diplomacy, which some experts say possibly shows the urgent need for outside relief.
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The border reopening possibly shows the North is exploring more sustainable ways to deal with the coronavirus threat that may go on for years. It could also provide glimpse into the North’s plans for vaccines against COVID-19.
North Korea so far has shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because those have international monitoring requirements. But some experts say the North may still seek the help of China and Russia to provide regular testing and vaccinations of workers and troops in border areas, where access from other regions will be tightly restricted.
North Korea’s resumed trade with China will almost certainly be driven by imports as much of the country’s major export activities are banned under international sanctions tightened since 2016, when Kim began accelerating weapons development. The country needs fertilizers to boost food production, construction materials to support Kim’s ambitious development projects and factory goods to spur industrial production decimated by the two years of halted trade.
Still, North Korea’s trade with China is expected to be significantly smaller compared to pre-pandemic levels.
North Korea likely doesn’t have enough foreign currency reserves to swiftly purchase a huge amount of goods, considering the toll of sanctions and pandemic-related difficulties. It would also be a major policy mistake to expand imports too quickly when an explosion in pent-up demand could further destabilize a fragile economy, experts say.
“It seems North Korea’s employing a ‘taste and test’ approach – it will continue to reopen its border in phases if the COVID-19 situation stabilizes but seal itself again if the virus situation worsens,” said Kim Byung-yeon, a professor of economics at Seoul National University. “It’s also likely that the state will try to enforce greater control over trade compared to the past and clampdown on activities like smuggling, so the trade activity likely won’t be as dynamic as it once was.”
AP · by KIM TONG-HYUNG · February 8, 2022
24. Terrorists, U.S. forces and a brutal dictator: Whatever happened to Syria?
Excerpt:
U.S. policy on Syria over the last decade has been marked by an inability to decide among poor options. But Syria illustrates the old maxim in international politics that no decision almost always ends up equaling a decision, as others seize the initiative and fill vacuums. In Syria, time has been lost, and problems have metastasized. What is needed is constancy of purpose and clearly defined priorities — integrated with skillful diplomacy and a modest amount of force. The moment for such a combination may have passed, but the world is often surprisingly open to U.S. leadership — even when it shows up late.
Terrorists, U.S. forces and a brutal dictator: Whatever happened to Syria?
The Feb. 3 U.S. military operation that killed the Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi threw a light not just on continuing terrorism in Syria, but also on an uncomfortable truth: Syria today ranks high among the world’s most dangerous unresolved problems. Three years after the dismantling of the ISIS territorial “caliphate” — which spanned large swathes of Syria and Iraq — terrorist cells still carry out attacks, a brutal dictator remains in charge and regional powers vie for zones of influence.
It is now more than a decade since the first flames of revolution were fanned inside Syria. By the latter part of 2011, the year of the Arab Spring, the dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen had been toppled; Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was dead. Analysts in the region and beyond assumed the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, would be next. In August of that year, the U.S. issued a call for regime change. “For the sake of the Syrian people,” President Barack Obama said, “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” A senior administration official told the Washington Post the White House was “certain Assad is on his way out.”
Nearly 11 years later, the root causes of the Syrian war remain unaddressed, diplomacy is stalled and Syria is a potential powder keg for the region and beyond. Terrorists are still there, U.S. forces are still there, and so are Assad and his regime, which attacked its own people with barrel bombs and chemical weapons.
A decade later, it’s worth asking: What happened to Syria?
A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad hangs in the old city of Syria's capital, Damascus, on Feb. 1. (LOUAI BESHARA/AFP via Getty Images)
Geopolitics: The “great game” in Syria
The Biden administration, its plate overflowing with new crises, has pursued a narrow-gauge policy toward Syria — focusing on terrorism and to a lesser extent humanitarian problems. But unless the United States is preparing to surrender its historic influence and leadership role in the Middle East, it will have to step up its game in Syria. Others have been at work.
In the six years since major powers began colliding in Syria, Russia comes closest to looking like a winner. Vladimir Putin intervened skillfully with his military, saved and propped up his beleaguered ally, secured permanent naval basing rights at the Mediterranean port of Tartus and an air base at Hmeimim in western Syria, drew leaders to Moscow for consultations, and projected an image of a country that stands by its allies. The defense ministry can claim its own “win” — having tested 600 new weapons systems during the war.
Moscow also gained a Mediterranean platform for its intervention in Libya with combat aircraft and mercenaries, mostly in support of the commander opposing the U.N.-backed government. In short, Syria was instrumental in securing one of Putin’s major goals: projecting Russia as a “great power” with expanding global influence.
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Iran has put down roots in Syria and appears likely to be there for the long term. By 2018, Iran had mobilized about 2,500 conventional forces and Revolutionary Guards to fight, along with an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 foreign fighters from Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan. Last year, scholars counted at least 14 areas of Iranian or pro-Iranian presence in Syria, compared with only three in 2013. Iran has dug in with particular determination in Deir al-Zour province in eastern Syria, along the Iraqi border, where its activities typify Tehran’s approach — providing services to the population, taking control of major cities and recruiting for its militia forces.
Most important, all this has secured for Iran the western end of its long-sought land bridge from Tehran to the Mediterranean, which enables the country to move military supplies securely from Iran through parts of Iraq, into Syria and via Syria to its Hezbollah partner in Lebanon. This gives Iran proximity to targets in Israel and leaves Israel to face an Iranian rocket arsenal aimed at the Golan Heights.
Israel, according to Defense Minister Benny Gantz, will not allow Iranian proxies in Syria to “equip themselves with means of combat that will undermine our superiority in the region.” Accordingly, Israel last year stepped up aerial attacks in Syria. Israeli goals are to prevent the above-mentioned Iranian weapons smuggling to Hezbollah and to degrade Iranian-allied militias, especially those posing a threat to the Golan Heights.
Turkey’s role is maddeningly complex, its interests pulled in multiple directions. With several military divisions arrayed along the country’s northern border with Syria, it has been steadfast in opposing Assad’s rule; Turkey occupies the northern zone in part to prevent the regime’s recapture of the area. At the same time, Turkey seeks to diminish the role of the U.S.-allied Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), because it’s convinced these Kurds are merely an extension of Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Ankara regards as a terrorist group. That in turn encourages Turkey to create refugee resettlement areas in the north, seeking to shift the demographic balance away from Kurdish domination — all of which risks pushing the Kurds closer to Assad, whom they have historically opposed. As I say, it’s complicated.
Along the way, Turkey has at times worked in concert with Russia when it comes to Syria — and then, more frequently, aimed to limit Russia’s role. In short, Turkey is all over the map — at least politically — seeking to find its balance and secure its interests amid all the colliding parties and interests.
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The Kurds dominate the SDF, an amalgam of Syrian Kurds, Arabs and ethnic Turkmen that came together to fight ISIS in 2015. They are backed by the U.S., and with about 25,000 to 30,000 Kurdish-dominated troops in northeastern Syria, exert limited control over about a quarter of the country, struggling to fend off Turkey and maneuvering between Russia and Iran. Their longer-term goal is to gain autonomy for Syrian Kurds in any future peace settlement.
The U.S. presence
Where, then, is the United States?
The tangible American stake in all this is represented by the approximately 900 U.S. troops split between a base in the Kurdish-controlled northeast and a small garrison at al-Tanf, deep in territory under Syrian-Russian-Iranian control and near the juncture of the Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian borders. These bases are what survived a push by President Donald Trump to withdraw completely in 2018 — a policy partly responsible for the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis. Trump ultimately backed off, saying he would keep a small number of bases in Syria to secure its few oil fields — a fig leaf quickly embraced by defense officials who thought it would be a mistake to pull out completely.
Today, these forces conduct patrols, advise and support the Kurdish SDF in its battles with ISIS, and contribute some stability in areas contested by multiple forces. Although not openly discussed, I believe the northeastern base also provides a buffer against attacks on Kurds by NATO ally Turkey. The garrison in the southeast stakes a small U.S. claim in an area Assad and his allies want to secure, and which was attacked late last year by Iranian-backed fighters. The presence of U.S. forces at both locations also facilitates counterterrorist operations such as the strike against the ISIS leader al-Qurayshi.
Terrorism: ISIS remnants, al-Qaeda spinoff
As for terrorists in Syria, ISIS remains the most dangerous organization, shown most recently by its capture of a prison in northern Syria that took the Kurds — with U.S. support — a week of violent counteroffensives to reverse. Reliable estimates of current ISIS strength are hard to come by, but in 2020, the U.N. put the number at about 10,000 fighters — operating in small cells floating back and forth between Syria and Iraq.
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Al-Qaeda per se has not been as much of a force in Syria; more significant is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which evolved from a local al-Qaeda affiliate. Although it adheres to a hard-line Salafist ideology, the group is making a concerted effort to blur its terrorist roots as it seeks to maintain a measure of control in the hotly contested northwestern province of Idlib. The province has long been a gathering spot for extremists; this was where the ISIS leader was found and killed.
A way forward?
As the U.S. weighs its policy and approach to Syria, it’s important to consider a few basic realities:
- There is obviously no military solution, even if continued U.S. military presence is essential to the search for one. A decade of fighting has produced only a conflict frozen in place.
- The U.N. envoy for Syria may continue to call meetings, but the U.N. process under Security Council Resolution 2254 — which called for a cease-fire and political solution — is moribund.
- The U.S. has sacrificed much leverage but remains the only country with a chance to bridge the chasms blocking some compromise.
- The U.S. can achieve nothing diplomatically without the participation of Russia, and perhaps Iran as well.
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As doubts about U.S. staying power grow, the idea is taking hold in the Middle East that Assad is here to stay. The United Arab Emirates reopened its Damascus embassy in 2018; Oman returned its ambassador in 2020, and Bahrain in late 2021. Saudi Arabia has put out feelers in intelligence channels, and Egypt has talked about “returning Syria to the Arab fold.”
It’s not hard to understand how U.S. policymakers might look at the Syrian labyrinth and say: This is just too hard, our plates are too full, we’ll continue whacking terrorists but otherwise we will focus on more immediately pressing problems.
But for the U.S. to turn away is to signal that brutal dictators can abuse their populations mercilessly and remain in power; that Iran will have achieved its arc of influence across the Middle East; and that Russia has outmaneuvered the U.S. in a region important to U.S. allies, where historically Washington has been the “honest broker”. It will also likely mean that the 12 million Syrians either internally displaced or refugees outside the country — the most profound human displacement since World War II — will remain adrift; that the primary catalyst of the Syrian civil war — popular demand for an end to harsh rule by a minority clan — will remain unaddressed; and that Islamist extremists will remain able to find refuge, recruit and plot amid the continuing chaos.
Syrian families live in abandoned schools in Idlib, Syria, on Dec. 3, 2021. (Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
If the U.S. does choose to step up its game, any strategy must be long-term, gradual and clear about priorities. The ultimate goal remains political reconciliation and a new or transitional government committed to serving all its citizens — as envisioned in that U.N. resolution. While that looks like fantasy today, in the long term it may be possible to press Assad for the safe return of refugees with internationally monitored resettlement, and similar conditions for the reintegration of opposition forces. This was the recommended approach of U.S. Special Representative for Syria Engagement Jim Jeffrey — and it is a goal for which the U.S. could marshal strong international support.
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A next priority could be limiting Iran’s role. The Iranians are currently too dug in to aim for expulsion any time soon, but it is not unrealistic to seek limits on its stockpiling of sophisticated weapons, for which the U.S. would need Russian leverage. This could be a follow-on objective if the U.S. and its partners succeed in renewing the 2015 deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program. Washington would need to think about what it might be willing to give Russia in return for its support. Were the U.S. to achieve some traction, there would be hope for bridging the “gulf of mistrust” that U.N. Syria Envoy Geir Pedersen said stymies the U.N. process.
U.S. policy on Syria over the last decade has been marked by an inability to decide among poor options. But Syria illustrates the old maxim in international politics that no decision almost always ends up equaling a decision, as others seize the initiative and fill vacuums. In Syria, time has been lost, and problems have metastasized. What is needed is constancy of purpose and clearly defined priorities — integrated with skillful diplomacy and a modest amount of force. The moment for such a combination may have passed, but the world is often surprisingly open to U.S. leadership — even when it shows up late.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
