Quotes of the Day:
"Philosophers warn us not to be satisfied with mere learning, but to add practice and then training."
- Epictetus
“Movements” are what take five or ten percent of people and make them decisive—because in a world where apathy rules, five or ten percent is an enormous number.”
- Bill McKibben
"The Bill of Rights wasn’t enacted to give us any rights. It was enacted so the Government could not take away from us any rights that we already had."
- Kenneth G. Eade, author
1. Readout of Defense Policy Board Meeting
2. Special Report: Amazon partnered with China propaganda arm
3. Foreign Disinformation Stokes Fears of Violence in US
4. Veterans and bi-partisan group of lawmakers look forward to Afghan war commission
5. Keeping the Wrong Secrets
6. Intel: Final defense bill gives Congress more oversight of US Syria policy
7. Xi and Putin’s Summit for Autocracy
8. The Solomon Islands Crisis Shows America Needs a New Pacific Strategy
9. The real trouble with Ukraine | Hew Strachan
10. Opinion | We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe
11. Russia Ukraine: Moscow lists demands for defusing Ukraine tensions
12. Agreement On Measures To Ensure The Security Of The Russian Federation And Member States Of The North Atlantic Treaty Organization
13. Chinese Spies Accused of Using Huawei in Secret Australia Telecom Hack
14. This Army Reservist’s Formula Predicts the Inside Layout of Buildings from Satellite Photos
15. US accuses Chinese tech firms, research institutes of weaponizing biotechnology, creating 'brain-control weaponry'
16. The End of the Afghanistan War Was Even Worse Than Anyone Realized
17. At Least 458 U.S. Crimes Tied to Extremism Involved Veterans, Active Duty Troops
18. The American People Want Realism And Restraint
19. Navy: No Honorable Discharge for Maverick Marine Scheller
20. Opinion | 3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection
21. The March of the New American Leninists
22. Obituaries in Fayetteville, NC - Renay Mandel Corren
1. Readout of Defense Policy Board Meeting
I have pasted the members of the Defense Policy Board below the article.
My questions are these:
Is there sufficient focus on irregular, unconventional, and political warfare incorporated into the merging concepts of integrated deterrence and strategic competition in the new National Defense Strategy?
Who on the Policy Board is ensuring these capabilities are accounted for? Except for Dr. Davidson (worked in the DOD office of stability operations) there are no members who have any academic or practical experience with irregular, unconventional, and political warfare.
Although Henry Kissnger did say this:
“We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.”
- Henry Kissinger
Readout of Defense Policy Board Meeting
Immediate Release
Dec. 16, 2021
Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby provided the following readout:
The Defense Policy Board met Wednesday, Dec. 15 and Thursday, Dec. 16 for the first time since completing Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III’s zero-based review process. The board is the second advisory committee to reconstitute since the review was completed. The Defense Business Board convened in November.
The board, led by Chair Madeleine K. Albright, received classified briefings on China military modernization, the National Defense Strategy priorities and strategic approach, integrated deterrence, the Nuclear Posture Review, and the Missile Defense Review from senior civilian officials.
Secretary Austin joined the meeting to receive an out brief from the board on their findings after reviewing a draft version of the classified 2021 National Defense Strategy.
The Secretary thanked the board members for dedication to the defense of the nation through their service on the board, and said he appreciated their advice and counsel as the Department continues to develop the 2021 National Defense Strategy.
The Defense Policy Board is chartered to provide independent advice and recommendations on matters concerning defense policy in response to specific tasks from the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, or the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
The board focuses on issues central to strategic Department of Defense planning; policy implications of U.S. force structure and force modernization on DoD’s ability to execute U.S. defense strategy; U.S. regional defense policies; and any other topics raised by the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, or the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Defense Policy Board
Mission: The Board, through the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD(P)), shall provide the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, independent, informed advice and opinions concerning matters of defense policy in response to specific tasks from the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, or the USD(P), as set out in paragraph four of our charter.
2. Special Report: Amazon partnered with China propaganda arm
Amazing.
An internal 2018 Amazon briefing document that describes the company's China business lays out a number of "Core Issues" the Seattle-based giant has faced in the country. Among them: "Ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the communist party to achieve and maintain its success," the document notes. "We are not making judgement on whether it is right or wrong."
That briefing document, and interviews with more than two dozen people who have been involved in Amazon's China operation, reveal how the company has survived and thrived in China by helping to further the ruling Communist Party's global economic and political agenda, while at times pushing back on some government demands.
In a core element of this strategy, the internal document and interviews show, Amazon partnered with an arm of China's propaganda apparatus to create a selling portal on the company's U.S. site, Amazon.com – a project that came to be known as China Books. The venture – which eventually offered more than 90,000 publications for sale – hasn't generated significant revenue. But the document shows that it was seen by Amazon as crucial to winning support in China as the company grew its Kindle electronic-book device, cloud-computing and e-commerce businesses.
But perhaps not surprising when you consider the quotes Lenin may have made (or he may not have made):
- The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
- When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope.
- The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.
- https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/02/22/rope/
Special Report: Amazon partnered with China propaganda arm
1/7
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up a Kindle Paperwhite during Amazon's Kindle Fire event in Santa Monica, California September 6, 2012. REUTERS/Gus Ruelas/File Photo
LONDON, Dec 17 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc was marketing a collection of President Xi Jinping's speeches and writings on its Chinese website about two years ago, when Beijing delivered an edict, according to two people familiar with the incident. The American e-commerce giant must stop allowing any customer ratings and reviews in China.
A negative review of Xi's book prompted the demand, one of the people said. "I think the issue was anything under five stars," the highest rating in Amazon's five-point system, said the other person.
Copies of the book "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" are displayed at the Hong Kong Book Fair, in Hong Kong, China, July 14, 2021. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
Ratings and reviews are a crucial part of Amazon's e-commerce business, a major way of engaging shoppers. But Amazon complied, the two people said. Currently, on its Chinese site Amazon.cn, the government-published book has no customer reviews or any ratings. And the comments section is disabled.
Amazon's compliance with the Chinese government edict, which has not been reported before, is part of a deeper, decade-long effort by the company to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business in one of the world's largest marketplaces.
An internal 2018 Amazon briefing document that describes the company's China business lays out a number of "Core Issues" the Seattle-based giant has faced in the country. Among them: "Ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the communist party to achieve and maintain its success," the document notes. "We are not making judgement on whether it is right or wrong."
That briefing document, and interviews with more than two dozen people who have been involved in Amazon's China operation, reveal how the company has survived and thrived in China by helping to further the ruling Communist Party's global economic and political agenda, while at times pushing back on some government demands.
In a core element of this strategy, the internal document and interviews show, Amazon partnered with an arm of China's propaganda apparatus to create a selling portal on the company's U.S. site, Amazon.com – a project that came to be known as China Books. The venture – which eventually offered more than 90,000 publications for sale – hasn't generated significant revenue. But the document shows that it was seen by Amazon as crucial to winning support in China as the company grew its Kindle electronic-book device, cloud-computing and e-commerce businesses.
Then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is pictured upon his arrival in Swanton, Ohio, U.S., September 26, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed/File Photo
The 2018 briefing document spells out the strategic stakes of the China Books project for Jay Carney, the global head of Amazon's lobbying and public-policy operations, ahead of a trip he took to Beijing. "Kindle has been operating in China in a policy grey area," the document stated, and noted that Amazon was having difficulty obtaining a license to sell e-books in the country.
"The key element to safeguard" against its license problem with the Chinese government "is the Chinabooks project," the document stated.
The document also noted: "Amazon.com/China books project has also gained wide recognition among Chinese regulators."
LIFE IN XINJIANG
The books include many apolitical titles, such as Chinese language textbooks, cookbooks and children's bedtime stories. But they also include titles that amplify the Communist Party's official line.
One book extols life in Xinjiang, where United Nations experts have said China interned one million ethnic Uyghurs in a network of camps. The book – "Incredible Xinjiang: Stories of Passion and Heritage" – discusses an online comedy show situated in the region. The book quotes an actor who plays a Uyghur "country bumpkin" saying that ethnicity is "not a problem" there. That echoes the position of Beijing, which has denied mistreating minority groups.
Some books portray China's battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, in heroic terms. One is titled "Stories of Courage and Determination: Wuhan in Coronavirus Lockdown." Another begins with commentary from Xi: "Our success to date has once again demonstrated the strengths of CPC (the Communist Party of China) leadership and Chinese socialism."
Chinese President Xi Jinping waves next to Premier Li Keqiang and former president Hu Jintao at the end of the event marking the 100th founding anniversary of the Communist Party of China, on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China July 1, 2021. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins/File Photo
The state-owned firm that partners with Amazon on China books, China International Book Trading Corp, or CIBTC, told Reuters that the venture is a "commercial relationship between two enterprises." China's National Press and Publication Administration, or NPPA, the state propaganda arm with which Amazon has had a partnership, had no comment.
In response to questions, Amazon said it "complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception." It added that "as a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word and diverse perspectives is important. That includes books that some may find objectionable."
Amazon said it has "a wide selection of books" on China, and the China Books portal "is an additional channel for serving our Chinese readers in the United States and elsewhere." CIBTC is "just one of the millions of selling partners around the world offering products in our stores."
Reuters News Agency provides news to China Central Television, the state-controlled broadcaster. The agency also distributes CCTV content via Reuters Connect, a marketplace that offers news from about 100 providers. The marketplace partnerships aren't connected to the Reuters newsroom.
The new details about Amazon's China strategy demonstrate the challenges Western companies face in accessing the world's most populous market – and in coping with an authoritarian regime that has been tightening control over public discourse.
Amazon said it has always complied with the law in India and doesn't favor its private-label products in search results. Regarding the United States, the company said it prefers U.S. federal privacy legislation, and that it protects consumers' privacy and doesn't sell their data.
Some companies have responded to Beijing's demands by leaving the market. Yahoo recently exited China and Microsoft Corp's LinkedIn announced it would pull out some of its services. Both cited the country's difficult business environment and regulatory requirements.
The sign of e-commerce website Amazon China is seen next to a Kindle e-reader displayed in this illustration , taken on December 15, 2021. REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration
Amazon, by contrast, has grown into a powerful economic force in China in recent years, providing lucrative export opportunities to thousands of Chinese businesses while growing its own industry-leading cloud-services unit. Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is now one of the largest providers to Chinese companies globally, according to a report this year by analysis firm iResearch in China, and people who have worked for AWS.
Still, by 2018, Amazon was receiving an "increasing number of requests from (Chinese) watchdogs to take down certain content, mostly politically sensitive ones," stated the briefing document prepared that year for Carney. He previously served as communications director for U.S. President Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama.
Amazon declined to make Carney available for an interview.
According to the briefing document, the Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC, asked Amazon in 2018 to take down a "link to China's new blockbuster film Amazing China because of especially harsh user reviews." The CAC is responsible for online security and content regulation.
"Amazing China" praises the country's accomplishments since Xi became president in 2013. CAC wanted the link removed from IMDb, an Amazon-owned website of movie information and reviews.
Amazon's China office responded to CAC that "it is difficult for Amazon China to accommodate such requests, and we'll relay the message to" Amazon headquarters "and seek their views about possibilities," the briefing document stated.
The film remains on IMDb's U.S. website. Shortly after the request, some negative reviews disappeared, archived screenshots of IMDb.com on archive.org show. Others remain, and "Amazing China" currently has an overall rating of just 2.3 out of a top score of 10. Some reviews call it "pathetic," "garbage" or "government propaganda."
"Some reviews submitted for the title 'Amazing China' were removed because they violated our user review content guidelines, with the majority being off topic," Amazon told Reuters. "IMDb is not aware of any request from external parties (including the Chinese government) to do anything about reviews for this title."
CAC didn't respond to a request for comment.
An Amazon Kindle displays a section of the Chinese edition of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" at the e-Book corner of the Hong Kong Book Fair July 18, 2012. REUTERS/Bobby Yip/File /File Photo
'WINK AND A NOD'
Amazon entered China in 2004 through a $75 million deal to acquire Joyo.com, an online book-and-media seller. Eventually, Amazon wanted to introduce e-books and its popular Kindle reading devices to the Chinese market.
To accomplish that, it worked with the General Administration of Press and Publication, or GAPP, a regulator that engages in state censorship in its role as overseer of publications in China. NPPA now handles most of GAPP's responsibilities. NPPA, in turn, is overseen by the Communist Party's Publicity Department, which was previously known as the Propaganda Department.
According to a former Amazon executive involved in talks with China, the company secured some, but not all, of the government approvals it needed to sell Kindle devices and e-books. That situation gave the government leverage over the retailer, the former executive said. Amazon's public-policy team came up with the China Books project as a novel way "to get what we wanted on Kindle and other things," the person said. "It was a wink and a nod."
Amazon soon began working with GAPP to set up China Books, according to the briefing document. The company planned to tout the portal to Chinese authorities as Amazon's only store named after a country, the document said. Amazon dedicated several employees to the effort, which involved CIBTC, the government book-trading company, which the document described as "the executing body from GAPP."
A photograph on CIBTC's website shows Chinese officials toasting the launch of the project at a hotel in Beijing in September 2011.
In October 2012, China Books was awarded the title, "a key national culture export" project, by a group of Chinese government bodies, including GAPP, as well as the entity now known as the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China. Two months later, Amazon launched its electronic-books business in China and soon began selling Kindles.
By the end of 2017, China had become Kindle's largest global market, "accounting for 40%+ of our world device sales volume," according to the 2018 briefing document. By then, Amazon had added a Chinese e-book store to its American website and had translated 19 books.
And Carney, the top public-policy executive who then reported to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, went to China in April 2018. There, he told an alternate member of the Communist Party central committee that Amazon would make "every effort" to promote China Books and make it "bigger and stronger," according to a CIBTC press release.
The briefing document prepared for Carney stated: "Both China Books and Kindle Chinese eBook Store are Amazon China's main commitment to assist China in 'Going Abroad,' an umbrella project that aims to promote Chinese culture to the world."
Amazon's China Books webpage prominently displays CIBTC's name, but doesn't disclose that it's a project that Amazon created in a partnership with a Chinese government agency.
"Details about the company are readily available online," Amazon told Reuters, "and CIBTC has placed its name and logo prominently throughout its page. Our relationship with CIBTC is entirely appropriate."
Eventually, the China Books project flopped financially, according to a person who has been involved in it. Few of the portal's titles have sold well, and Amazon even shipped back books because its warehouses lacked space for them.
An illustration shows books offered on Amazon.com, on a selling portal it created with China's government in what came to be known as the China Books project, taken December 14, 2021. REUTERS/Edgar Su/Illustration
Nonetheless, the China Books project continues. The Chinese-language version of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China Volume Three" – is listed first on China Books' "BEST SELLER" page. It recently showed a sales rank of 1,347,071. Another "best seller," about COVID-19, was ranked 10,654,483. The Xinjiang title, which Reuters purchased, had been ranked 13,441,455.
But sales weren't the goal, according to the person who has been involved in the project. "It's a high-level photo-op," part of a "soft-power campaign to basically put the books out there and just have it be visible."
In its statement to Reuters, CIBTC, the government book-trading company, said it doesn't "rank books sold through Amazon." It didn't elaborate.
A THREAT TO 'RETALIATE'
Amazon continued its Chinese expansion in 2013, announcing the introduction in Beijing of Amazon Web Services, its cloud-computing business. At the time, no Chinese law regulated cloud services, the 2018 briefing document noted.
In 2016, China began taking actions that made it more difficult for foreign cloud-computing firms, such as AWS, to operate in the country.
The government began requiring cloud providers to hold a new license that only Chinese-owned companies could obtain, according to the briefing document. "Regulators have since become very hostile" toward AWS, the 2018 document stated.
The result was that Amazon took an unusual step for the company: It handed off its cloud technology to local companies so it could keep operating in China. The Chinese companies – not Amazon – were responsible for "monitoring and taking down illegal content, collecting and reporting basic information of customers … and working with PRC (the People's Republic of China) authorities on all compliance-related inquiries that may arise," the 2018 document stated.
In its statement to Reuters, Amazon said that AWS, as a foreign cloud provider, has to license or sell technology to local partners in China in order to have a presence there.
That structure didn't shield AWS from Chinese pressure, however.
In February 2018, China's Ministry of Public Security, or MPS, called AWS to a meeting, the briefing document stated. MPS threatened to "retaliate" against Amazon unless it removed content and blocked a website it hosted in the United States for Guo Wengui, a Chinese dissident. AWS refused, the document said. But the company asked Guo to take an action that exposed the dissident's Internet Protocol, or IP address, and AWS "provided to MPS" this data, the document stated. An IP address is a unique code that identifies a computer accessing the internet.
The ministry "recognized our effort to find a solution, though not ... to their satisfactory level," the document stated.
The 2018 briefing document advised Carney to raise the government's request on Guo when meeting a top Ministry of Commerce official in Beijing, and stress that China shouldn't make requests that involve data stored abroad.
Asked about the Guo incident, Amazon confirmed it received the Chinese government's request, but said it "did not provide any non-public information or any other customer information."
The commerce ministry said Guo wasn't discussed at the meeting with Carney. Amazon didn't say whether Guo came up.
An employee for MPS said the ministry doesn't respond to requests for comment. An attorney for Guo said Guo had no comment.
AWS's China business continues to grow. Despite being blocked from selling cloud services to the government and some state-owned enterprises, AWS has landed key customers in China, say people familiar with the matter.
Among them are two Chinese companies, Tiktok developer ByteDance and video-surveillance firm Hikvision, as well as multinationals Nike, Samsung and Philips, according to the 2018 briefing document and a 2019 blog on AWS's website. Philips declined to comment; the other four companies didn't respond to requests for comment.
In June, AWS announced it was expanding further in the country, "to support the demands of our growing customer base in China."
Reporting by Steve Stecklow in London and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco. Additional reporting by the Reuters Shanghai newsroom. Editing by Peter Hirschberg.
3. Foreign Disinformation Stokes Fears of Violence in US
I have shared this NSS excerpt many times. But it is what we must consider if we are going to deal with disinformation. We need to unite against our external enemies rather than succumb to their efforts to "disunite" us at home.
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation." (page 14)
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/.../NSS-Final-12-18...
Foreign Disinformation Stokes Fears of Violence in US
December 15, 2021 10:16 PM
Jeff Seldin
Ongoing efforts by foreign intelligence services and global terrorist organizations to seed the United States with disinformation appear to be working, raising new fears of a terrorist attack in the coming weeks, according to a senior Homeland Security official.
The warning, while largely consistent with the department’s most recent anti-terrorism bulletin issued in November, comes as the country prepares for the Christmas holiday and New Year celebrations, along with the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
“The threat is more volatile,” John Cohen, the senior most official at DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, told a virtual forum Wednesday.
“We've made progress. We're continuing to make progress on a day-to-day basis,” Cohen added. “But we still have a ways to go.”
November’s anti-terrorism bulletin warned that the U.S. was facing “a significant threat” from domestic extremists for the remainder of 2021 and extending into early 2022.
But Cohen told the forum, hosted by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, the risks have become more unpredictable due to “a significant level of activity by foreign intelligence organizations,” many gaining traction with unrelenting disinformation campaigns that he described as both persistent and highly sophisticated.
“What makes the environment more volatile, from my perspective, is that the narratives that are being promoted by these threat actors are rapidly finding their way into the mainstream media ecosystem where they're being amplified by public figures, in the media, in government,” he said.
“Their objective may be political or ratings-based,” Cohen said. “But in the current threat environment, the broader that these narratives are shared and spread, the higher the likelihood that they will be consumed by an individual who will use it as a justification for violence.”
Other warnings
This is not the first time Cohen has warned about the dangers of disinformation from foreign intelligence services and terror groups. Nor is he alone in his concerns.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned Tuesday of “serious and significant” ramifications from the spread of disinformation.
“False narratives present a threat to our security,” Mayorkas said during the Bloomberg Technology Forum. “We need our leaders to step up and fight against it because the words of leaders, they matter quite a bit. They can be very influential in the public discourse.”
Former intelligence officials and analysts have told VOA the groundwork for the latest destabilizing efforts was laid before the 2020 election, with Russia in particular finding ways to ingratiate a stable of influence peddlers to U.S. audiences on the far right and the far left.
“Generally speaking, getting Kremlin- or Beijing-friendly narratives to be repeated by mainstream outlets is the ultimate end goal of those running malign influence campaigns,” Bret Schafer, a digital disinformation fellow with the Washington-based Alliance for Securing Democracy, told VOA via email.
“It’s far more effective to have messages come from known and trusted sources within a society than from without, so influential figures and outlets have long been targeted by those seeking to influence American public opinion,” he added.
U.S. officials believe Iran and China have copied the Russian playbook, with varying degrees of success.
This past July, social media giant Facebook announced it took down an Iranian campaign known as Tortoiseshell, which aimed to manipulate American military personnel and defense contractors on social media.
That effort by Tehran followed an email campaign launched just ahead of the U.S. 2020 elections aimed at intimidating U.S. voters.
And as far back as March 2020, senior State Department officials said Russia, China and Iran were finding ways to amplify each other’s disinformation campaigns regarding the origins and the spread of the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19.
According to U.S. officials and analysts, these sorts of efforts have only continued to gain in popularity, with a variety of adversaries focused on using many of those same issues to reach and possibly influence vulnerable Americans.
“The first part is, can you rally an audience to do something awful or change a vote or that sort of thing, which is an enduring sort of campaign,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told VOA.
Watts, a former FBI special agent, said the second part of these influence operations is potentially even more dangerous.
“It's the acute scenario, which means putting [social media] accounts under cover to look like and talk like Americans into spaces where they know there are people that have a propensity to violence,” he said. “It's a numbers game. … You throw the idea out and if your audience is large enough, and the larger audience gets it, the greater the chance that one of them will pick up on that and run with it.”
Best defense: informed citizens
Top U.S. law enforcement officials have raised concerns, though this past March, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau’s efforts can only do so much.
"At the end of the day, no amount of FBI investigating can by itself sufficiently insulate our country from this threat," Wray said at the time. "Our best defense is a well-informed public."
Nonetheless, Cohen, the senior intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security, said Wednesday that helping make sure the American public can see through some of these influence operations has been difficult.
“Trying to educate the public that, depending on where they get their information, they may be specifically being targeted with disinformation, that is the biggest challenge we're facing right now,” Cohen said. “For a subset of our population, they're not going to believe what the government is telling them.”
4. Veterans and bi-partisan group of lawmakers look forward to Afghan war commission
Will we get an objective critical look at the entire history of our involvement? And can and will we learn our lessons?
Veterans and bi-partisan group of lawmakers look forward to Afghan war commission
For many veterans across the United States, the way the war in Afghanistan concluded is still raw.
While Afghanistan gradually fades from the news cycle, many veteran organizations are still seeking both closure and accountability for America’s longest war.
Following advocacy from multiple veterans organizations, including Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Concerned Veterans for America, and VoteVets, Congress included the Afghanistan War Commission Act in this weeks’ passage of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. The hope is that not only will the Commission lead to accountability for U.S. mistakes in Afghanistan, but that the final report will provide valuable lessons for U.S. policymakers in future conflicts.
“[The Commission] is something that’s never been done in U.S. history,” Matt Zeller, senior advisor to IAVA, told Military Times. “Honestly, if it had been done at the end of other wars, who knows how different things would have been for the better.”
Like other veterans of the war in Afghanistan, Zeller worked tirelessly to evacuate Afghans who fought alongside U.S. forces from the country. However, he said that tens of thousands of Afghans who qualified for a Special Immigrant Visa were left behind in the hands of the Taliban.
“That’s on top of all the P-1 and P-2 visa applicants that Afghan military and commandos would fall under,” Zeller said. “The number is easily in excess of 200,000 people that got left behind.”
Paratroopers assigned to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, facilitate the safe evacuation of U.S. citizens, Special Immigrant Visa applicants, and other at-risk Afghans out of Afghanistan at Kabul Airport in August. (Defense Department)
Zeller is optimistic that through a four-year investigation, the report generated by the Afghanistan Commission will provide a template to prevent a repeat disaster. Ultimately, Zeller hopes that in future conflicts, it will be a matter of policy that local nationals who work with U.S. forces will be evacuated before the last U.S. troops withdraw.
“The goal [is] that the negative stuff is never repeated,” Zeller said. “And that we put into place laws, policies, and procedures that prevent us from ever having the fiasco of the Afghan evacuation again.”
Aside from the fraught final U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, lawmakers and other veterans groups hope the commission will examine the entirety of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
“Congress owes the thousands of American service members who sacrificed in Afghanistan a serious, honest and long-term effort devoted to bringing accountability and transparency to the mistakes made during the 20-year war that was shaped by four administrations and 11 Congresses,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who authored the bi-partisan act, said in a release.
Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., who co-sponsored the act, echoed the sentiment.
“Working through this commission, we must also understand what led to the sudden collapse of the Afghan government following our disastrous withdrawal,” Sen. Young told Military Times in an email. “This will examine what went right, what went wrong, and hold those responsible accountable for their actions.”
A U.S. airman carries a child during the evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 20, 2021. (Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla/Marine Corps)
Once established, the commission will examine the entirety of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Utilizing a bi-partisan approach, lawmakers in Senate and House committees on armed services, intelligence and foreign relations will spend four years compiling lessons learned.
The final report, which will be modeled after the 9/11 Commission, will examine U.S. involvement in detail. Included will be an examination of all U.S. combat operations, the authorities used for conducting the war in Afghanistan and the role government agencies, such as the State Department, played in the conflict going awry.
“This legislation is a critical step to making sure our leaders are accountable to the American people and towards ensuring we do not again get sucked into another endless war that is not in our national interest,” Russ Duerstine, deputy director of Concerned Veterans for America, told Military Times in an email.
CVA, a conservative-leaning veterans organization funded by the Koch brothers, teamed up with self-described “progressive” VoteVets to support adding the Afghanistan Commission Act into the fiscal 2022 defense bill, highlighting the importance of accountability on Afghanistan to veterans across the political spectrum.
“Concerned Veterans for America and VoteVets traditionally find ourselves on opposing sides of most issues,” VoteVets said in a release. “The American people deserve an honest examination of the decision making that led to 20 years of failed foreign policy in Afghanistan.”
An airman comforts an infant during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 20, 2021. (Sgt. Isaiah Campbell/Marine Corps)
For Zeller, the issue is non-partisan. Further, the U.S. experience in Afghanistan was an unfortunate repeat of history that could have been avoided had a similar “after-action review” took place after the Vietnam War.
“I keep going back and thinking about [Vietnam],” Zeller said. “There’s a lot of similarities in how it ended in terms of betrayal and the moral injury suffered by veterans.”
Following the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in 1975, an estimated 250,000 Vietnamese who supported the U.S. were branded as traitors and forcibly sent to Communist re-education camps.
This was partly due to the U.S. being unable to evacuate those vulnerable to such treatment at the hands of the communists, Zeller argued, and those were lessons that should have been learned and applied to 2021′s exit from Afghanistan.
However, with Vietnam deeply unpopular at home, said Zeller, veterans of the war there found themselves ostracized and without the political power to effect change.
According to Zeller, today’s veterans have never been more politically organized or enjoyed more public support, unlike following Vietnam. Because of that, Zeller believes veterans possess the political clout to ensure that mistakes made in Afghanistan are recognized, and lessons from the conflict are engrained in U.S. policy so that history, once again, does not repeat itself.
“There is going to be a point in time in which we’re going to have a bunch of Americans who weren’t alive during the Afghan War,” Zeller said. “That’s where this report becomes a gift to future Americans because it will outlive all of us and be a historical record of everything that went down.”
James R. Webb is a rapid response reporter for Military Times. He served as a US Marine infantryman in Iraq. Additionally, he has worked as a Legislative Assistant in the US Senate and as an embedded photographer in Afghanistan.
5. Keeping the Wrong Secrets
Interesting critique on the security clearance and classification system.
Excerpts:
The inventor Charles Kettering once observed that “when you lock the laboratory door, you lock out more than you lock in.” In the early twentieth century, when the current classification system took shape, the information worth protecting was mostly located inside federal agencies, so locking the door made some sense. Today, however, Kettering’s observation applies more than ever. Private entities have access to more, and in many cases better, information than the government, so locking the door only isolates federal agencies without protecting much information worth keeping secure.
What a twenty-first-century approach to national security information requires is greater attention to privacy. Yet the United States has done little to protect the information about ordinary citizens that in a world of artificial intelligence and machine learning poses a growing threat to national security. The United States spends billions of dollars to protect classified information, much of which is already readily available from public sources. But it does little to enable its citizens, including those in important government positions, to keep their private lives from being documented, tracked, and exposed. In so doing, it is leaving pieces of the mosaic of U.S. national security lying around for its adversaries to gather up and put together.
Keeping the Wrong Secrets
How Washington Misses the Real Security Threat
The United States keeps a lot of secrets. In 2017, the last year for which there are complete data, roughly four million Americans with security clearances classified around 50 million documents at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of around $18 billion.
For a short time, I was one of those four million. From 2014 to 2015, I worked for the general counsel of the Department of Defense, a position for which I received a security clearance at the “top secret” level. I came into the job thinking that all the classified documents I would see would include important national security secrets accessible only to those who had gone through an extensive background check and been placed in a position of trust. I was shocked to discover that much of what I read was in fact not all that different from what was available on the Internet. There were exceptions: events I learned about a few hours or even days before the rest of the world, for instance, and information that could be traced to intelligence sources. But the vast bulk of the classified material I saw was remarkable only for how unremarkable it was.
The U.S. system for classifying secrets is based on the idea that the government has access to significant information that is not available, or at least not widely available, to private citizens or organizations. Over time, however, government intelligence sources have lost their advantage over private sources of intelligence. Thanks to new surveillance and monitoring technologies, including geolocation trackers, the Internet of Things, and commercial satellites, private information is now often better—sometimes much better—than the information held by governments.
At the same time, these technologies have given rise to an altogether new threat: troves of personal data, many of them readily available, that can be exploited by foreign powers. Each new piece of information, by itself, is relatively unimportant. But combined, the pieces can give foreign adversaries unprecedented insight into the personal lives of most Americans.
Yet the United States has not begun to adapt its system for protecting information. It remains focused on keeping too many secrets that don’t really matter, treating government information like the crown jewels while leaving private data almost entirely unguarded. This overemphasis on secrecy at the expense of privacy isn’t just inefficient. It undermines American democracy and, increasingly, U.S. national security, as well.
EPIDEMIC OF ESPIONAGE
The U.S. government did not always keep so many secrets. At the turn of the twentieth century, in fact, it had no formal nationwide system of secrecy. That began to change after Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, stunning Western countries and signaling the rise of a new regional power in Asia capable of challenging the major powers in Europe. Japan had long prohibited emigration, but it had lifted this restriction in 1886, just as its military prowess was beginning to grow. By 1908, around 150,000 Japanese immigrants had entered the United States.
As the number of new arrivals ticked up, American newspapers began reporting stories about “Japanese spies roaming about the Philippines, Hawaii, and the continental United States, busily making drawings of the location of guns, mines, and other weapons of defense,” as The Atlanta Constitution put it in 1911. Journalists at The Courier-Journal detailed a sophisticated Japanese spying operation in Los Angeles, Portland, and the harbors around Puget Sound, including rumors that “agents of the Japanese War Office, in the guise of railroad section laborers or servants in families residing in the locality, are stationed at every large railroad bridge on the Pacific coast.” These stories were fantastic—and likely false, for the most part, as were widespread tales of Japanese candy store operators who were really mapmakers, Japanese fishermen who were really taking harbor soundings, and Japanese barbers who picked up military secrets from their unsuspecting clients.
Members of Congress, alarmed by the stories, decided to act. The Defense Secrets Act, passed in 1911, was the first U.S. law to criminalize spying. It provided that “whoever, . . . without proper authority, obtains, takes, or makes, or attempts to obtain, take, or make, any document, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, plan, model, or knowledge of anything connected with the national defense to which he is not entitled” could be fined or imprisoned.
The United States is focused on keeping too many secrets that don’t really matter.
After war broke out in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress and asked it to strengthen the laws against sedition and the disclosure of information. His racist nativism on full display, he declared, “There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America” who “have sought to pry into every confidential transaction of the Government in order to serve interests alien to our own.” The result was the Espionage Act of 1917—a law that, with a few revisions, still forms the main legal basis for proscribing the unauthorized disclosure of national security information in the United States. The law was extraordinarily broad, criminalizing the disclosure of “information respecting the national defence” that could be “used to the injury of the United States.”
Now there were rules criminalizing the disclosure of national security secrets. But what was a secret? Historians consider the American Expeditionary Forces’ General Order No. 64, also issued in 1917, to be the first attempt by the U.S. government to adopt a formal classification system for government information that had national security value. In the years that followed, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy adopted their own regulations on classified information, producing a mishmash of classification rules across the military branches. Then, in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt displaced this series of decentralized classification rules with an executive order making it unlawful to record “certain vital information about military or naval installations” without permission. The rules applied to aircraft, weapons, and other military equipment, as well as to books, pamphlets, and other documents if they were classified as “secret,” “confidential,” or “restricted.”
Since then, many presidents have issued executive orders that define what information is classified, how it is classified, and who can access it. The latest comprehensive executive order, issued by President Barack Obama in 2009, lays out three levels of classification—top secret, secret, and confidential—along with a vast array of rules about what each level of classification means. Under the order, classified documents originate in two ways: one of the 1,867 officials designated as having “original classification authority” decides that a document should be classified or one of the four million or so individuals with access to classified material creates a new document using information that was already classified—so-called derivative classification. In 2017, more than 49 million government-generated documents were derivatively classified.
SECRECY BEGETS SECRECY
Almost everyone who has examined the U.S. system of keeping secrets has concluded that it results in mass overclassification. J. William Leonard, who led the Information Security Oversight Office during the Bush administration, once observed that more than half of the information that meets the criteria for classification “really should not be classified.” Others would put that number much higher. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and later of the CIA, once complained of receiving a “Merry Christmas” email that carried a top-secret classification.
One factor driving overclassification is the fact that those who do the classifying are almost always incentivized to err on the side of caution—classifying up rather than down. When I worked at the Pentagon, if I made a mistake and classified a document or an email at too high a level, there would likely be no penalty. As far as I know, no one in the offices I worked with was ever disciplined for classifying a document too high. Classifying a document too low, however, can bring serious professional consequences—not to mention potentially threaten U.S. national security. Secrecy, in other words, is the easiest and safest course of action.
Secrecy also begets more secrecy, because documents must be classified at the highest level of classification of any information they contain. If a ten-page memo contains even a single sentence that is classified as top secret, for instance, the memo as a whole must be classified as top secret (unless it is “portion marked,” meaning that each segment—the title, each paragraph, each bullet point, and each table, for instance—is given a separate mark of classification). This requirement fuels an endless progression of derivative classification that compounds the United States’ already enormous overclassification problem.
hidden harm
The democratic costs of overclassification are hard to overstate. To note the obvious: a state cannot keep secrets from its enemies without also keeping them from its own population. Massive government secret keeping undermines democratic checks and balances, since it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the public—and, often, for members of Congress—to know what the executive branch is up to.
The U.S. government has done horrific things when acting in secret. CIA black sites, where detainees suspected of involvement in terrorist groups were tortured during the Bush administration, could not have survived public scrutiny—which is why they operated in secret for years. Secrecy also undermines American democracy in more subtle ways. When the government keeps secrets, those secrets enable—and sometimes require—lies. When those lies are exposed, public trust in the government takes a hit—as it did in 2013, when Edward Snowden, then a contractor for the National Security Agency, revealed the existence of a massive surveillance program under which the agency had accessed the email, instant-messaging, and cell phone data of millions of Americans. That revelation eroded trust in U.S. intelligence agencies, making it harder for them to operate—precisely the opposite of what the government’s secrecy was meant to achieve.
Snowden speaking in Strasbourg, France, March 2019
Vincent Kessler / Reuters
Secrets also have a chilling effect on free speech. In May 2019, the Department of Justice indicted Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing organization WikiLeaks, on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining and publishing classified documents. It was the first time the government had brought such charges for publication alone, raising fears in the media that the government might start using the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists. As The New York Times reported at the time, Assange had been charged for actions that the paper itself had taken: it had obtained the same documents as WikiLeaks, also without government authorization, and published subsets of them, albeit with the names of informants withheld.
And it is not just whistleblowers and journalists who need to worry; former government officials can also be caught in the classification vise. Even after leaving office, government employees are not only subject to potential criminal prosecution if they disclose classified information that they learned while in government but also required to submit their writings (and drafts of public talks) for “prepublication review.” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser to President Donald Trump, became an unexpected poster child for abuse of the prepublication review process after his book was subjected to delays that appeared politically motivated. He is far from alone. Millions of former government employees, including me, are bound by similar rules. The real harm of this system is not to former government employees, however. It is to the quality of public discourse, as former government employees with knowledge about the U.S. national security system too often decide that it is easier to simply stay silent.
Overclassification also makes it difficult to keep the secrets that really matter. As the Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart put it in his concurring opinion in the 1971 case ordering the release of the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s classified history of the U.S. role in Vietnam, “When everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.” Too much secrecy can also make it harder to protect the American public from national security threats—for instance, by limiting information sharing that could inform decision-making or identify new dangers. One reason the plot to carry out the 9/11 terrorist attacks was not detected in advance, the 9/11 Commission found, was too much secrecy: the failure to share information between agencies and with the public allowed the attackers to succeed. “We’re better off with openness,” said Thomas Kean, the chair of the commission. “The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public.”
EYES AND EARS EVERYWHERE
But perhaps the biggest cost of keeping too many secrets is that it has blinded the United States to an emerging and potentially even more dangerous threat: new tracking and monitoring technologies that are making it increasingly difficult to conceal even the most sensitive information. Take the exercise app Strava, which allows athletes to record their runs and bike rides, among other activities, and share them with friends. In 2017, this seemingly innocuous app became a national security nightmare after a student in Australia began posting images that showed the activities of American Strava users on what appeared to be forward operating bases in Afghanistan and military patrols in Syria. Others quickly generated maps of a French military base in Niger and of an Italian base and an undisclosed CIA site in Djibouti. Soon, it became clear that Strava data could be used not only to reveal the inner workings of such military installations but also, with a few tweaks, to identify and track particular individuals.
Hundreds of similar apps track the locations of unwitting Americans every day, collecting information that is bought and sold by data aggregators. One such company, X-Mode, collects, aggregates, and resells location data so granular that it can track the movements of individual devices and even determine their hardware settings. X-Mode collects this information through its own applications, but it also pays app developers who use X-Mode’s software developer and its location-tracking code for their data. According to a 2019 news report, X-Mode had access to location information for an average of 60 million global monthly users. In late 2020, Apple and Google banned X-Mode from collecting location information from mobile devices running their operating systems, but the tracking technology remains widespread.
X-Mode is the best-known location-tracking data aggregator, but it is far from the only company taking advantage of publicly available information to track people’s private lives. The New York–based company Clearview AI has devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app that allows users to upload photos and run them against a database of more than three billion images scraped from Facebook, Venmo, YouTube, and millions of other websites to identify the people in the photos. Federal and state law enforcement agencies have found the app to be much better than the FBI’s own database for tracking down criminal suspects. In 2019, the Indiana State Police solved a case in 20 minutes after uploading to Clearview an image from a cell phone video shot by a bystander to a crime. The man identified as the criminal suspect did not have a driver’s license and was not in any government database, but someone (not the man himself) had posted a video of him on social media along with a caption containing his name. He was quickly arrested and charged.
Keeping too many secrets has blinded the United States to an emerging and dangerous threat.
The rise of the Internet of Things—networked devices—means that more information is being collected about people’s daily lives than ever before, including vast troves of voice data generated by voice-operated assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa. In a 2017 report, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, identified the cybersecurity vulnerabilities produced by the Internet of Things as a key threat to national security. But the report focused narrowly on the physical dangers that sophisticated cybertools might pose to consumer products such as cars and medical devices and did not address the threats that these tools might pose to information security. Late last year, Congress enacted the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act, which established minimum security requirements for connected devices. But the law applies only to devices sold to the federal government. Private citizens are on their own. And devices are hardly the only way that companies collect personal information. Facebook makes third-party plug-ins, such as “like” and “follow” buttons and tracking pixels, that its advertising partners can add to their own, non-Facebook websites and applications. These plug-ins, in addition to collecting data for Facebook partners, enable Facebook to monitor the online activities of its users even when they are not on its site.
The spies that necessitated the Espionage Act a century ago have largely been replaced by this ubiquitous tracking and monitoring technology. If an app can expose the location and identity of U.S. soldiers on forward operating bases in Afghanistan, it can do the same to intelligence officers working at the CIA’s headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, or even to the secretary of defense and his or her family members. Forget trying to place operatives under cover again. No matter how careful they have been to keep their identities off the Internet, their friends’ photos of them on Facebook and Instagram and inescapable surveillance videos that data aggregators and their customers can easily access will make it nearly impossible to hide their true identities and contacts, much less the identities and whereabouts of their families and friends.
The U.S. government may have refrained from sounding the alarm in part because its own intelligence agencies are exploiting such vulnerabilities themselves. Documents disclosed by WikiLeaks in 2017, for instance, revealed that the CIA had exploited a vulnerability in Samsung-connected televisions to use them as covert listening devices. But while the U.S. government has kept mum, private industry has met and sometimes surpassed authorities’ ability to collect information. Nongovernmental organizations working in conflict zones now crowdsource conflict-related information that is often as good as or better than the information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies. At the same time, private satellite companies provide on-demand access to sophisticated satellite imagery of practically any location on earth. In short, the government no longer has a monopoly on the information that matters.
THE MOSAIC THEORY
In the national security world, there is a concept known as “the mosaic theory.” It holds that disparate, seemingly innocuous pieces of information can become significant when combined with other pieces of information. This theory is one reason why the vast majority of individuals with access to classified information are told that they cannot judge what information should be classified. A document that appears meaningless might, when put together with other information, give away an important piece of the mosaic to an adversary.
Historically, intelligence analysts have pieced together bits of information to complete the mosaic. As specialists in their fields, good analysts come to know when a seemingly inconsequential piece of information may be significant in context. The advent of big data, combined with artificial intelligence, promises to upend this traditional approach. To understand why, consider the breakthrough made by the retail giant Target almost a decade ago. Like most companies, Target assigns its customers ID numbers tied to their in-store cards and to their credit cards, names, and email addresses. When a customer makes a purchase, that information is collected and aggregated. In 2012, a statistician working at Target figured out that he could use this information, together with purchase information from women who had set up baby registries, to determine who was likely pregnant. Women who were pregnant started buying unscented lotion, for instance, and they were more likely to purchase calcium, magnesium, and zinc supplements. Using this information, Target was able to create a “pregnancy prediction score,” calculate where women probably were in the course of their pregnancies, and send women coupons for products they may need. This technology only came to public attention after an angry customer complained to a manager at Target that the company was sending mailers to his daughter that clearly targeted pregnant women. Later, he called to apologize: “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg testifying on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., October 2019
Erin Scott / Reuters
That was one company monitoring one set of purchases nearly a decade ago with the help of a simple statistical analysis. Now consider what an adversary could do if it combined that kind of information with similar information from a variety of databases and then used modern artificial intelligence to detect patterns.
This is likely already happening. China is suspected of collecting the personal data of millions of Americans. William Evanina, former director of the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, warned in early 2021 that China had stolen personal information belonging to 80 percent of Americans, including by hacking health-care companies and smart home devices that connect to the Internet. In April, federal investigators concluded that Chinese hackers may have scraped information from social media sites such as LinkedIn to help them determine which email accounts belonged to system administrators, information that they then used to target Microsoft’s email software with a cyberattack. In other words, China appears to have built a massive data set of Americans’ private information using data illegally obtained and scraped from publicly available websites.
In March 2014, Chinese hackers broke into computer networks of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which houses personal information of all federal employees, and obtained the files of tens of thousands of employees who had applied for top-secret security clearances—including me. Although these files were not classified, they contained valuable national security information: the identities of government employees with top-secret clearances, as well as their family contacts, overseas travel and international contacts, Social Security numbers, and contact information for neighbors and friends. Combined with the database of Americans’ personal information, this information has likely put China in a position to determine which federal government employees with top-secret access are carrying large credit card debts, have used dating apps while married, have children studying abroad, or are staying unusually late at the office (possibly signaling that an important operation is underway). In short, while the U.S. government has been wasting its energy protecting classified information, the vast bulk of which is unimportant, information with much greater national security value has been left out for the taking.
Ending overclassification
The current U.S. national security system was designed to protect twentieth-century secrets. At the time the system was created, most important national security information was in the government’s hands. It made sense to design a system devoted almost entirely to keeping spies from obtaining that information and preventing insiders from disclosing it. Today, however, government information has been eclipsed by private information. The United States needs an approach to national security information that reflects that new reality. It must fundamentally reform the massive national security system that has created a giant edifice of mostly useless classified information and reduce the amount of private information that is easily attainable.
In pursuit of the first aim, the United States should start by imposing an automatic ten-year declassification rule for all classified information. Currently, all classified records older than 25 years are supposed to be automatically declassified, but there are so many exceptions to that rule that many documents remain secret for a half century or more. It took until 2017 to declassify 2,800 classified records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, for instance, and even then the Trump administration held some records back.
A ten-year declassification timeline should have only two exceptions: information classified as “restricted data” under the Atomic Energy Act and information identifying intelligence agency informants who are still alive. Decisions about whether declassifying any other information might harm national security should be left to an independent review board made up of former government officials, historians, journalists, and civil rights advocates. A government agency facing the automatic declassification of information it deemed potentially harmful could appeal to the board to extend the classification period—in essence, forcing the agency to justify any deviation from the rule. By making declassification the default, such a rule would incentivize the government to adequately resource the review process and to allow it to take place in a timely manner.
China is suspected of collecting the personal data of millions of Americans.
The government should also harness the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify cases of overclassification. Individual government employees who routinely overclassify information relative to their peers could be identified, notified that they classify documents more often than others, and encouraged to be more careful to assess the true need to classify. Artificial intelligence may also eventually be able to suggest classification levels at the time employees are writing documents or emails, to challenge incorrect classification decisions at the time they are made, and to review the classification of stored documents.
Ending mass overclassification would free officials to think more creatively about addressing the emerging threat posed by enormous troves of readily available personal data. Washington can begin by following the lead of Beijing, which despite being an intrusive surveillance state recently enacted one of the strongest data privacy laws in the world—likely not primarily to protect its citizens’ privacy but to prevent their data from being collected and exploited by foreign adversaries. The law applies to all entities and individuals, both inside and outside China, that process the personal data of Chinese citizens or organizations, imposing controls on the data and allowing Chinese citizens to sue if the information is stolen, misused, or corrupted. In so doing, the law discourages companies doing business in China from collecting and retaining personal data that could be of interest to foreign intelligence services. In other words, China is working to close the door to foreign powers seeking to exploit the personal data of its citizens, while the United States has left that door wide open.
Privacy in the United States, meanwhile, relies on a patchwork of federal and state laws, each of which addresses elements of the problem, but none of which is comprehensive. For years, civil liberties groups have been calling on the federal government to protect the private information of individuals, but those calls have gone mostly unheeded. Today, however, it is increasingly clear that protecting the privacy of Americans is necessary not just to ensure their civil liberties but also to defend the country.
A twenty-first-century approach to national security information requires greater attention to privacy.
Congress should start by expanding to all Internet-connected devices the same security requirements that currently apply only to those such devices that the government owns or operates. One subset of Internet-connected devices poses an especially acute danger: those that monitor the human body. These include fitness trackers that are worn on the body but also devices that are implanted or inserted into it: pacemakers, cardioverter defibrillators, and “digital pills” with embedded sensors that record that the medication has been taken. To reduce the vulnerability of these devices to hacking, federal regulators must require manufacturers to improve their security protocols.
The government should also give consumers new and better tools to control the data that companies collect about them. The Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act, introduced in March by Representative Suzan DelBene, Democrat of Washington, would require “opt in” and “opt out” consent and “plain English privacy notices.” These measures would certainly be improvements over the status quo. But research shows that consumers tend not to read disclosures, so even clear individual opt-in and opt-out requirements may not limit data collection from unwitting consumers. The proposed legislation would also preempt state laws that may be more protective than the federal law, meaning that it may actually reduce protections in some places. A better option would be for Congress to enact a federal law that follows the example recently set by California, requiring businesses to respect individuals’ choices to universally opt out of data collection. That would be an important step toward giving control back to consumers.
Last, Congress should create an independent federal agency to monitor and enforce data protection rules. The United States is one of only a few democracies that does not have an agency dedicated to data protection. Instead, it relies on the Federal Trade Commission, which has many competing obligations. The proposed Data Protection Act of 2021, introduced in June by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic of New York, would create an agency to “regulate high-risk data practices and the collection, processing, and sharing of personal data”—in particular, by data aggregators. Establishing such an agency would also allow the federal government to develop expertise in data privacy issues and to respond more quickly and effectively to new challenges and threats.
LOCKED OUT
The inventor Charles Kettering once observed that “when you lock the laboratory door, you lock out more than you lock in.” In the early twentieth century, when the current classification system took shape, the information worth protecting was mostly located inside federal agencies, so locking the door made some sense. Today, however, Kettering’s observation applies more than ever. Private entities have access to more, and in many cases better, information than the government, so locking the door only isolates federal agencies without protecting much information worth keeping secure.
What a twenty-first-century approach to national security information requires is greater attention to privacy. Yet the United States has done little to protect the information about ordinary citizens that in a world of artificial intelligence and machine learning poses a growing threat to national security. The United States spends billions of dollars to protect classified information, much of which is already readily available from public sources. But it does little to enable its citizens, including those in important government positions, to keep their private lives from being documented, tracked, and exposed. In so doing, it is leaving pieces of the mosaic of U.S. national security lying around for its adversaries to gather up and put together.
6. Intel: Final defense bill gives Congress more oversight of US Syria policy
Intel: Final defense bill gives Congress more oversight of US Syria policy
Lawmakers are grabbing the reins on the Biden administration’s dormant approach to Syria’s conflict.
The US Senate voted 88-11 on Wednesday to pass next year’s annual defense spending bill, rushing through a compromise version that now heads to President Biden’s desk.
A number of amendments were stripped from the $778 billion bill after already having passed the House, including measures regarding US policy in the Middle East.
But a handful of provisions on regional policy survived the backroom deals, including one demanding stricter oversight of Washington’s policies towards the conflict in Syria.
The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requires the administration to report to lawmakers on its vision for an endgame for the conflict, as well as on diplomatic means to achieve those objectives in talks with major players like Russia and Turkey.
Lawmakers are demanding to see a timeline for weaning local Syrian fighters off US military support, as well as a plan for convincing foreign governments to repatriate their citizens detained in prison camps housing Islamic State members in Syria.
The measure, authored by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), chair of the House’s foreign affairs panel, and Middle East subcommittee chair Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), accompanies another which would require the administration to report publicly on the Assad family’s personal finances — a potential indicator of whether US economic sanctions are changing the regime’s behavior.
Why it Matters: Congress is turning up the heat on the White House’s stance towards Syria’s stalemated conflict.
Biden administration officials insist the policy is grounded in humanitarian concern, rather than a subset of the Trump administration's counter-Iran strategy. They have also publicly warned of the risk of US economic sanctions for dealing with the Assad regime.
The Syria measure could enable lawmakers to press policymakers on that issue in particular. Yet critics have said the bill misses other opportunities to reform Washington’s policy in the region.
What’s Next: The bill heads to President Biden’s desk.
Know More: Read Al-Monitor’s report on Rep. Ro Khanna's amendment to curtail US support for the Saudi-led war effort in Yemen.
7. Xi and Putin’s Summit for Autocracy
Democracy a "lofty aspiration" and "common value" and also a "right?" We should be able to use those words effectively in an information and influence activities campaign. "Xi said..."
Excerpts;
“President Xi stressed that democracy is a lofty aspiration and common value of all humanity and also a right enjoyed by people of all countries,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated in its readout. “Whether a country is democratic or not and how to better realize democracy can only be left to its own people to decide.” In other words, China is already democratic enough, thank you very much.
Xi was so bold as to claim that “[p]romoting greater democracy in international relations and upholding true multilateralism is the expectation of the people and the prevailing trend of the times.”
Putin reinforced Xi’s talking points. “Russia is ready for more communication with China on defending true democratic rights and interests of all countries,” the Chinese readout states.
Obviously, neither regime is truly democratic. Xi and Putin are not only attempting to muddy the waters on the meaning of democracy, but they are also seeking to deflect criticism of their human rights abuses. Xi lamented that other unnamed countries (the U.S.) are “trying to meddle” in their “internal affairs” under the “pretext of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’,” and thereby supposedly violating “international law.” Both Xi and Putin vowed to counter such efforts through the United Nations and other international bodies, claiming to be the true representatives of “multilateralism.”
Xi and Putin’s Summit for Autocracy
The two leaders stressed the strength of their relationship and vowed to protect each other’s interests.
(Photograph by Yin Bogu/Xinhua via Getty Images.)
Last week, the State Department hosted the Summit for Democracy, a long-planned event dedicated to one of the central themes of Joe Biden’s presidency. According to Biden, the world is currently embroiled in a contest between autocracies and democracies. The virtual gathering was intended to help buttress the latter. This didn’t escape the attention of the world’s two leading autocrats: China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
This week, Xi and Putin offered counterprogramming in the form of their own virtual summit. While Biden’s online gathering included participants from dozens of countries, Xi and Putin limited their screen-to-screen encounter on December 15 to just the two of them. Here are several key takeaways, based on readouts provided by the Chinese and Russian governments.
Xi and Putin crowed that their partnership is stronger than ever and vowed that any effort to break their relationship will fail.
Both Xi and Putin stressed that their countries’ relations are the “best in history,” even during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has apparently drawn them closer. Putin added that they enjoy a “high degree of strategic mutual trust.”
According to a summary prepared by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the two men explained that their cooperation covers a wide-ranging sphere of activities. For instance, this year marks the 20th anniversary of the “Treaty of Good-neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation,” which the countries have renewed. This treaty and other accords have ensured that China and Russia support “each other’s core interests, thus defending the national dignity and common interests of both countries.”
Indeed, one could say that even though they have not entered into a formal military alliance, each country has pledged to protect the others’ vital interests. Putin listed the ways in which they’ve become integrated, saying the two nations will continue to bolster their economic and trade ties, including cooperation in the “oil and gas, finance … aerospace and aviation” industries, as well as by working on “major projects of strategic importance.” Putin said he will also “promote greater synergy between the Eurasian Economic Union,” a Moscow-led economic project intended to aid post-Soviet countries, and Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.
One line in the Chinese readout caught my eye more than any other. It reads: “No attempt to sow discord between Russia and China will ever succeed.”
Perhaps that is bluster. But on its face, it is a stark rebuttal to the idea, advanced in some Western foreign policy circles, that the U.S. can drive a wedge between the two by granting various concessions to Moscow. It should be noted that Putin consistently rejects this proposal. Just last month, for example, he argued that the two countries enjoy “an all-embracing strategic partnership.”
Russia and China are trying to redefine democracy.
As I’ve written in the past, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is trying to redefine democracy such that its totalitarian regime qualifies. This rhetorical strategy is intended to undermine the meaning of the word democracy at a time when the U.S. and its allies are seeking to draw a contrast between free forms of government and Beijing-style autocracies. Xi and Putin played this game during their virtual summit.
“President Xi stressed that democracy is a lofty aspiration and common value of all humanity and also a right enjoyed by people of all countries,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated in its readout. “Whether a country is democratic or not and how to better realize democracy can only be left to its own people to decide.” In other words, China is already democratic enough, thank you very much.
Xi was so bold as to claim that “[p]romoting greater democracy in international relations and upholding true multilateralism is the expectation of the people and the prevailing trend of the times.”
Putin reinforced Xi’s talking points. “Russia is ready for more communication with China on defending true democratic rights and interests of all countries,” the Chinese readout states.
Obviously, neither regime is truly democratic. Xi and Putin are not only attempting to muddy the waters on the meaning of democracy, but they are also seeking to deflect criticism of their human rights abuses. Xi lamented that other unnamed countries (the U.S.) are “trying to meddle” in their “internal affairs” under the “pretext of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’,” and thereby supposedly violating “international law.” Both Xi and Putin vowed to counter such efforts through the United Nations and other international bodies, claiming to be the true representatives of “multilateralism.”
8. The Solomon Islands Crisis Shows America Needs a New Pacific Strategy
Excerpts:
The United States has an indispensable role to play in a secure, prosperous, and free Pacific Islands region – a region where it has been active since nearly the founding of the Republic and where it has unique national interests.
While coordinating with partners and allies is essential in this era of renewed Great Power competition, and burden-sharing is a logical response for a superpower with global commitments, Washington cannot simply assume that it shares even its closest partners’ appraisal of complex, fluid events. The United States must adjust its thinking in the Pacific, and build the institutions and capabilities necessary to operate nimbly and effectively in an increasingly crowded and tense geopolitical neighborhood.
The Solomon Islands Crisis Shows America Needs a New Pacific Strategy
The U.S. has been largely subcontracting its foreign policy for many Pacific Islands to Australia and New Zealand. That needs to change.
By Alexander B. Gray and Cleo Paskal
December 17, 2021
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The recent eruption of civil unrest in the Solomon Islands has prompted extensive commentary in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand seeking to understand the causes of the violence. While some of this commentary has captured the myriad issues generating dissatisfaction with the government of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, including discontent with his 2019 switch of diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Beijing’s corrupting role in the Solomon Islands, less attention has been paid to the larger lessons for U.S. policy in the Pacific.
The current crisis offers an opportunity for Washington to reimagine the scope of its engagement with the Pacific Islands – and understand why it will be a critical element in any policy trying to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific.
Since World War II, the United States has adhered to an artificial, informal division of “strategic oversight” of the Pacific Islands between Washington and its two regional Five Eyes partners, Australia and New Zealand. The vast region is broadly divided into three zones – Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia – each containing several independent countries.
The three independent countries comprising the North Pacific Micronesian region (the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau) are tied closely to the U.S. through Compacts of Free Association, allowing unrestricted U.S. military access and the denial of such access for others in exchange for social services payments and visa-free travel to the United States. Washington is well aware of developments in these countries, maintains a significant diplomatic and military presence, and engages with their leaders frequently – though perhaps not enough.
The two other regions, Melanesia and Polynesia, by contrast, have been largely ignored by U.S. policymakers since the end of the Cold War, with the understanding that Canberra and Wellington would assume the lion’s share of responsibility for their security. Australia and New Zealand have historical, economic and, in some instances, cultural ties in those regions, and their shared conception of a free and open Indo-Pacific has enabled Washington policymakers to justify subcontracting U.S. diplomacy and statecraft in the Pacific Islands.
Yet the recent imbroglio in the Solomon Islands is revealing the folly of this approach. While Australia and New Zealand are two of the United States’ most reliable partners, with the former playing an indispensable role in the growing rivalry with China, the United States’ interests in the Pacific are unique to its global role and the increasing centrality of full-spectrum competition with Beijing. Outsourcing the effective representation of American interests on this front line of strategic competition to even its closest friends is fraught with peril.
Take Canberra’s intervention in the recent Solomon Islands unrest. The presence of Australian personnel may stem the immediate violence; however, it is also likely to entrench the rule of Sogavare, whose corruption, pro-Beijing policies, and determination to suppress opposition to his switch of recognition from Taipei are directly contrary to U.S. interests. The U.S. deferral to Canberra on issues relating to Melanesia, including the Solomon Islands, requires reexamination.
This problem is both conceptional and institutional. Washington’s overreliance on others in the Pacific Islands is exacerbated by a weakness at the very foundations of American diplomacy: embassies and consulates.
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The Solomon Islands, site of the battle of Guadalcanal where so many Americans gave their lives in brutal combat to free the country, currently lacks a permanent U.S. diplomatic presence. The U.S. Embassy in Papua New Guinea attempts to fill the gap from nearly 1,000 miles away. It provides similar coverage to Vanuatu, over 1,500 miles away, where there are recurring rumors of PRC interest in port facilities. The U.S. Embassy in Suva, Fiji provides diplomatic coverage for five countries, many with significant geopolitical ramifications for the United States, including Kiribati, which similarly switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019.
The lack of a permanent diplomatic presence furthers the reliance on Canberra and Wellington, who have substantial diplomatic, intelligence, and military apparatuses in Melanesia and Polynesia. These partners share their assessments of on-the-ground developments, including the most recent upheaval in Honiara, with their American counterparts, understandably filtered through an Australian or New Zealand strategic, economic, cultural, and historical lens.
Without similar representation, U.S. diplomats lack comparable opportunity to provide actional recommendations for U.S. policymakers in Washington that reflect the reality of American interests and strategic requirements, or even the sort of insights only possible through direct bilateral engagement.
The Honiara crisis is an opportunity for the United States to reevaluate its approach to the Pacific and act accordingly.
First, Washington should make clear that, while it disproves of violence, the U.S. has grave concerns about numerous facets of the Sogavare government’s behavior, both toward domestic critics and in regards to China. Privately, the United States should encourage a constitutionally-based resolution to the present strife that does not artificially cement Sogavare’s hold on power and, in turn, cement Beijing’s influence in the Solomon Islands.
Second, the Biden administration should make increasing the U.S. diplomatic presence in the Pacific a major priority. Maintaining strong, independent bilateral relations with each independent Pacific Island should be a priority of the U.S. State Department, and it requires funding, personnel, and institutional support. Embassies are needed urgently in Honiara (Solomon Islands), Port Vila (Vanuatu), Tarawa (Kiribati), and Nuku’alofa (Tonga), along with in-country staff focused on the full-range of bilateral issues.
Third, the U.S. should prioritize the quick resolution of the renegotiations of the Compact of Free Association with the three Micronesian states, as recommended in a bipartisan letter signed by 15 members of Congress.
Fourth, the United States should begin immediate discussions with Nauru, Tuvalu, and Kiribati regarding their potential interest in Compacts of Free Association. These three states are particularly vulnerable to Chinese economic and military coercion, as seen with Beijing’s growing influence in Kiribati. At relatively low cost, the United States would head off the sort of unrest now being seen in the Solomons, gain access to strategic locations in the Pacific while being able to deny other actors possible basing rights or dual use access (as is currently being explored by China and Kiribati).
Fifth, Washington must think creatively about expanding the full breadth of bilateral relationships with the Pacific Islands. This includes actively encouraging the Peace Corps to return volunteers to the region (where they engendered goodwill for decades), and increasing security assistance, through U.S. Coast Guard ship-rider visits, National Guard partnership programs, and rotational law enforcement missions to help with a range of issues that affect economic development and domestic security such as illegal fishing and transnational crime. It also means assisting the Pacific Islands with environmental programs that strengthen island resilience to extreme weather events.
The United States has an indispensable role to play in a secure, prosperous, and free Pacific Islands region – a region where it has been active since nearly the founding of the Republic and where it has unique national interests.
While coordinating with partners and allies is essential in this era of renewed Great Power competition, and burden-sharing is a logical response for a superpower with global commitments, Washington cannot simply assume that it shares even its closest partners’ appraisal of complex, fluid events. The United States must adjust its thinking in the Pacific, and build the institutions and capabilities necessary to operate nimbly and effectively in an increasingly crowded and tense geopolitical neighborhood.
9. The real trouble with Ukraine | Hew Strachan
I remember attending a conference where General Mattis was the keynote speaker and he lamented there are no strategists in the US. He said he had to outsource strategic thinking to Britain and people such as Hew Strachan.
Conclusion:
The problem for NATO is less that Putin will overplay his hand and more that it will overplay its. So far Putin has adroitly remained below the threshold where he would tip his western adversaries into overt war. When they identify Russia’s actions as ‘hybrid warfare’, using subversion and dissension as instruments designed to achieve its objectives, they implicitly recognise NATO’s own vulnerabilities. The dangers here are twofold. First, the onus to escalate will be on NATO, not on Russia. Secondly, the US and Britain could translate their rhetorical ambiguity into military action, although they have not thought through whether they have the will or the means to put their ambitions into effect. Dominated by domestic political challenges and rendered dysfunctional and inward-looking by the Omicron variant (for all its international transmissibility), they seem unable to think strategically. The biggest danger then is miscalculation – and one whose consequences would be open-ended. The US withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement in 2019 has undermined the security architecture created to accommodate nuclear weapons in Europe, a point which Russia is exploiting. Nor would the consequences be confined to one continent. After all, a ‘hot’ war in eastern Europe, even if not orchestrated by Russia with China, would also create opportunities for the latter in East Asia and the western Pacific.
The real trouble with Ukraine | Hew Strachan
The west risks overreacting to Russia's gamble
Hew Strachan | Professor of International Relations at St. Andrews, and world-renowned expert on war, military strategy and the British Army.
iai.tv · by Hew Strachan · December 14, 2021
Putin has been winning in Ukraine. The country is nowhere near joining NATO, a western goal only a few years ago, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea is a geopolitical fact. Putin is also a master in using military force in ways that don’t quite cross over to hot war. Western powers have been signalling that they won’t allow a new invasion of Ukraine to go unpunished. But judging when to act, and how, is crucial. The pompous, yet vacuous rhetoric used by the west risks pushing the conflict over the line into a military one, for which there is no strategy or exit plan, writes Hew Strachan.
On December 12 the foreign ministers of the G7 states met in Liverpool to avert the danger of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. They were a bit late. The war has been going on for well over seven years. In 2014 Russia annexed Crimea and occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Donbass in Ukraine’s south-east. Sporadic fighting and a steady if sustainable flow of casualties have continued ever since.
The front line, with its trenches and no man’s land, is fixed, not fluid. The western powers can conveniently classify this as a ‘frozen conflict’, not a ‘hot’ war. That suits Russia. It serves geopolitical purposes which reach back to the reign of Catherine the Great. The question is now whether Russia’s escalation will make that fiction impossible to sustain for the west. Sometimes rhetoric binds you to unwise acts.
Russia’s strategy in Ukraine has been working
Regaining control of Ukraine reflects Russia’s long-term interests. It secures Russia’s access from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea and thence – via the international waterway of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles – to the Mediterranean. The combination of a warm-water port, open all the year round, with the grain surpluses of Ukraine made this part of the Tsarist empire of vital economic and strategic importance. Ukraine was integral to Russia while conscious of its own national difference. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 Ukraine became an independent socialist republic but, following a bloody civil war, by 1921 most of it was absorbed in the Soviet Union. For Russia, Ukraine indubitably remains part of its ‘near abroad’.
The cards are almost all in Putin’s hands.
Putin’s aim has been equally consistent. Ukraine must not become a NATO member. That would put the old Cold War adversary directly athwart Russia’s routes south and end any hopes of Ukraine’s re-incorporation within Russia’s sphere of interest. So far he is winning. In 2014 Barak Obama seemed to favour NATO extending membership to Ukraine, although openly he confined himself to calling on it to help in its military modernisation. It was clear, when the NATO members met in Wales that year, that Ukraine could not expect anything more. In 2021 nothing has changed. Ukraine is still not a NATO member and so is not covered by article 5 of the Atlantic Charter, which makes an attack on one an attack on all. Neither President Biden, when he met Putin online for talks, nor the G7 foreign ministers in Liverpool put a military option on the table. If Russia defreezes the conflict, economic sanctions will follow, not an escalation to major war.
The cards are almost all in Putin’s hands. He has already gained a great deal. He has told the west what he wants and so far they have acceded to that demand. Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, would like Ukraine to be a NATO member but there have been no echoing chords from western leaders. As the long-term head of a unitary power, unfettered by the sometimes converging but frequently divergent interests of an alliance, Putin can act unilaterally and at speed. He can stop and start as he chooses. He is operating on short lines of communication, adjacent to Russia’s own frontiers, across which there are ethnic Russians for whom his first language is also theirs. Most of them are entirely loyal to the nations in which they reside but that does not stop him manipulating their presence as the threat of a fifth column. Above all, he understands how to use military force in limited ways.
As it emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and as the threat of an imminent nuclear exchange lessened the leverage of deterrence in maintaining the global order, Russia re-engaged with the idea of war as a continuation of policy by other means. So, of course, did the United States, especially after the 9/11 attacks. But they did so in different ways. Both use limited means (which above all excludes the use of nuclear weapons) but only Russia adopts ends which are also limited and so configured to match the means it is ready to employ. Its objectives are politically specific (that Ukraine should not become a NATO member) and geographically contained. By using proxies, ‘little green men’, disinformation and plausible deniability, and also by operating in its own backyard, it keeps means and ends in step.
Rhetoric which borders on the vacuous does not establish clear foreign policy objectives and fails to generate strategies capable of effective application.
The west’s rhetorical ambiguity
The western powers seem incapable of not dressing up every confrontation as an existential crisis for freedom and democracy. This does not mean that NATO and the western powers are not in the business of protecting both, and rightly so. But rhetoric which borders on the vacuous does not establish clear foreign policy objectives and fails to generate strategies capable of effective application. Given the ambitions of the ‘global war on terror’ in 2001 and their abject defeat in Afghanistan in 2021, the emptiness of big ideologies as declaratory war aims should be evident. But in the same week both President Biden and the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, produced similar statements. The only military element in Biden’s remarks was a reference to article 5, but only designed to reassure existing NATO members also adjacent to Russia’s borders, Poland and the Baltic states. It is worth noting that the British tank in whose turret Truss was photographed was in Estonia, not Ukraine.
In December 1994, in Budapest, under the terms of the non-proliferation treaty on nuclear weapons, Russia, the United States and Britain guaranteed the security of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, in return for those three countries giving up the Soviet missiles that had been located on their soil. In 2014 the US and Britain accused Russia of breaching the Budapest agreement by its actions in Crimea and Donbass. Russia responded by charging the US with also doing so, saying it had orchestrated the Maidan demonstrations in Kyiv which had led to the ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004 and to those of 2014. The Budapest agreement – not NATO membership – has been the legal foundation for Ukraine’s own claims to international support.
The problem for NATO is less that Putin will overplay his hand and more that it will overplay its.
The problem for Ukraine is that both the US and Britain, unlike Russia, are separated from eastern Europe not just by the sea but also by a significant land mass. Neither of them possesses direct regional leverage. From the outset, the US disputed the idea that the Budapest agreement imposes military obligations on its signatories. Now its people have responded to its administration’s shifting priorities. In 2018 a poll for the Ronald Reagan Institute found that 21 percent of Americans thought China was their greatest threat and 30 percent Russia; today 52 percent fear China and 14 percent Russia. It is hard so see how Biden could sell a war with Russia. Despite the Salisbury attacks, Britain is probably in the same position. It too has used its recent Integrated Review to trumpet its shift to the ‘Asia-Pacific’.
Time is on Putin’s side, yes it is
Putin is an opportunist with a long-term strategy and his timing looks good. Historically the big western player in Ukraine since 1917 has been Germany. It used the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 to engineer an economic partnership with Ukraine, initially the better to fight the First World War and then to recover from it. In 1939 Ukraine was fully united for the first time thanks to the German-Soviet pact and the partition of Poland. In 1941 many Ukrainians – ill-advisedly but not incomprehensibly – welcomed the German invasion of Soviet Russia. For these very reasons, however, a very different Germany remains reluctant to exercise its latent hegemony in 2021. The new coalition government is most unlikely to use military force and, although it is supportive of the G7’s possible use of economic sanctions, it remains to be seen whether it will abandon the Nord Stream 2 gas supply from Russia.
The problem for NATO is less that Putin will overplay his hand and more that it will overplay its. So far Putin has adroitly remained below the threshold where he would tip his western adversaries into overt war. When they identify Russia’s actions as ‘hybrid warfare’, using subversion and dissension as instruments designed to achieve its objectives, they implicitly recognise NATO’s own vulnerabilities. The dangers here are twofold. First, the onus to escalate will be on NATO, not on Russia. Secondly, the US and Britain could translate their rhetorical ambiguity into military action, although they have not thought through whether they have the will or the means to put their ambitions into effect. Dominated by domestic political challenges and rendered dysfunctional and inward-looking by the Omicron variant (for all its international transmissibility), they seem unable to think strategically. The biggest danger then is miscalculation – and one whose consequences would be open-ended. The US withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement in 2019 has undermined the security architecture created to accommodate nuclear weapons in Europe, a point which Russia is exploiting. Nor would the consequences be confined to one continent. After all, a ‘hot’ war in eastern Europe, even if not orchestrated by Russia with China, would also create opportunities for the latter in East Asia and the western Pacific.
iai.tv · by Hew Strachan · December 14, 2021
10. Opinion | We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe
Here we go. I pre-ordered Dr. Walters. new book just now.
Excerpts:
Her bottom line: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.” She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency — the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases — and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
...
The enemies of democracy must not be allowed to prevail. We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.”
Opinion | We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe
The Washington Post · by Dana MilbankColumnist |AddFollowToday at 2:38 p.m. EST · December 17, 2021
If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own.
Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence. By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the United States, but Walter, a longtime friend who has spent her career studying conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Rwanda, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere, applied the predictive techniques herself to this country.
Her bottom line: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.” She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency — the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases — and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
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Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.
U.S. democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the five years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone; by the end of his presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800. “We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”
Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war (six points in three years would qualify as “high risk” of civil war). “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter writes. “A country standing on this threshold — as America is now, at +5 — can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”
Others have reached similar findings. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the United States on a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report last month. “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself," the report said. And a new survey by the academic consortium Bright Line Watch found that 17 percent of those who identify strongly as Republicans support the use of violence to restore Trump to power, and 39 percent favor doing everything possible to prevent Democrats from governing effectively.
The question now is whether we can pull back from the abyss Trump’s Republicans have led us to. There is no more important issue; democracy is the foundation of everything else in America. Democrats, in a nod to this reality, are talking about abandoning President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in favor of pro-democracy voting rights legislation. Republicans will fight it tooth and nail.
The enemies of democracy must not be allowed to prevail. We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.”
It is no exaggeration to say the survival of our country is at stake.
The Washington Post · by Dana MilbankColumnist |AddFollowToday at 2:38 p.m. EST · December 17, 2021
11. Russia Ukraine: Moscow lists demands for defusing Ukraine tensions
I wonder if Putin is taking a page from Kim Jong-un. Putin's demands here and Kim's demands for an end of the US hostile policy certainly have some similarities or parallels. We should understand the blackmail diplomacy and political warfare strategies.
Russia Ukraine: Moscow lists demands for defusing Ukraine tensions
Published
16 hours ago
Russia has demanded strict limits on the activities of the US-led Nato military alliance in countries in Eastern Europe.
The demands, which are unlikely to be met, come amid Western fears Russia plans to invade its neighbour Ukraine.
Russia denies this, but wants Nato to rule out Ukraine and others ever joining the alliance to defuse the situation.
It has asked for urgent talks with the United States.
The US said it was open to talking but that it would be putting its own concerns on the table too.
"We've had dialogue with Russia on European security issues for the last twenty years," National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Friday.
"That has sometimes produced progress, sometimes produced deadlock, but we are fundamentally prepared for dialogue."
Earlier on Friday, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters the US will not go into the talks alone: "There will be no talks on European security without our European allies and partners."
Nato, which was originally set up to defend Europe against possible threats from the former Soviet Union, has forces in the Baltic republics and Poland.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia had given the US and Nato two draft treaties. There was no other option, he said, as the "state of relations between Russia and the collective West is a total lack of trust".
In the proposals Russia sets out a series of radical demands, which require countries that joined Nato after the fall of the Soviet Union not to deploy troops or weapons in areas where they could be seen as a threat to Russia. Heavy bombers and warships would not be allowed in areas outside their national airspace or waters from which they could launch an attack.
That would mean Nato not playing any role at all in any of the three Baltic republics or Poland. And Nato would have to abandon any plans for Ukraine and Georgia to eventually join the Western alliance.
Russia asks for the impossible
Diplomacy is the art of the possible. Well it was… until now.
It's virtually impossible to imagine the US and Nato signing the draft documents Russian diplomats have drawn up, without considerable changes.
Russia demanding a veto on who joins the Alliance. A non-starter. Nato has said many times before that Moscow can have no say over who gets to be a member.
Plus the Russians want to turn the clock back to May 1997. Any country that joined the Nato alliance after that date won't be allowed Nato troops or weaponry. How would the Baltic states, which view Russia as a potential threat, feel about that?
Moscow knows very well it's demanding things the West won't deliver, so why ask?
A negotiating tactic, perhaps. Ask for the world and hope to secure other concessions.
Or it may be designed for domestic consumption: to convince the Russian public that growing tension between Russia and the West isn't Moscow's fault. Russia invaded Georgia during a brief war in 2008 and seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 before backing separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Conflict in the east began in April 2014 and has claimed more than 14,000 lives, with casualties still being reported.
However, the build-up of Russian forces in areas beyond Ukraine's borders has prompted fears of another Russian invasion.
EU leaders warned at a summit late on Thursday night that any aggression would have "massive consequences and severe cost" and spoke of restrictive measures while calling for diplomatic efforts to resolve the increase in tensions.
They said diplomacy should focus on the four-way dialogue between Paris, Berlin, Kyiv and Moscow, known as the Normandy format. Russia pointedly preferred to focus on talks with the US.
Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has warned that Russia is increasing, not reducing, its troops on the border with "combat-ready troops, tanks, artillery, armoured units, drones [and] electronic warfare systems".
Image source, Reuters
Image caption,
Several ceasefires have been agreed but violence is still going on in eastern Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday he would prefer sanctions to be imposed immediately, before Russia took any military action.
Ukraine shares borders with both the EU and Russia, with which it has deep social and cultural ties.
12. Agreement On Measures To Ensure The Security Of The Russian Federation And Member States Of The North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Here is the draft treaty on the RUssian Foreign Ministry website.
17 December 2021 13:26
AGREEMENT ON MEASURES TO ENSURE THE SECURITY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION AND MEMBER STATES OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION
Unofficial translation
Draft
The Russian Federation and the member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), hereinafter referred to as the Parties,
reaffirming their aspiration to improve relations and deepen mutual understanding,
acknowledging that an effective response to contemporary challenges and threats to security in our interdependent world requires joint efforts of all the Parties,
determined to prevent dangerous military activity and therefore reduce the possibility of incidents between their armed forces,
noting that the security interests of each Party require better multilateral cooperation, more political and military stability, predictability, and transparency,
reaffirming their commitment to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, the 1997 Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between the Russian Federation and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 1994 Code of Conduct on Politico-Military Aspects of Security, the 1999 Charter for European Security, and the Rome Declaration "Russia-NATO Relations: a New Quality" signed by the Heads of State and Government of the Russian Federation and NATO member States in 2002,
have agreed as follows:
Article 1
The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties.
The Parties shall settle all international disputes in their mutual relations by peaceful means and refrain from the use or threat of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.
The Parties shall not create conditions or situations that pose or could be perceived as a threat to the national security of other Parties.
The Parties shall exercise restraint in military planning and conducting exercises to reduce risks of eventual dangerous situations in accordance with their obligations under international law, including those set out in intergovernmental agreements on the prevention of incidents at sea outside territorial waters and in the airspace above, as well as in intergovernmental agreements on the prevention of dangerous military activities.
Article 2
In order to address issues and settle problems, the Parties shall use the mechanisms of urgent bilateral or multilateral consultations, including the NATO-Russia Council.
The Parties shall regularly and voluntarily exchange assessments of contemporary threats and security challenges, inform each other about military exercises and maneuvers, and main provisions of their military doctrines. All existing mechanisms and tools for confidence-building measures shall be used in order to ensure transparency and predictability of military activities.
Telephone hotlines shall be established to maintain emergency contacts between the Parties.
Article 3
The Parties reaffirm that they do not consider each other as adversaries.
The Parties shall maintain dialogue and interaction on improving mechanisms to prevent incidents on and over the high seas (primarily in the Baltics and the Black Sea region).
Article 4
The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.
Article 5
The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.
Article 6
All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.
Article 7
The Parties that are member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine as well as other States in the Eastern Europe, in the South Caucasus and in Central Asia.
In order to exclude incidents the Russian Federation and the Parties that are member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization shall not conduct military exercises or other military activities above the brigade level in a zone of agreed width and configuration on each side of the border line of the Russian Federation and the states in a military alliance with it, as well as Parties that are member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Article 8
This Agreement shall not affect and shall not be interpreted as affecting the primary responsibility of the Security Council of the United Nations for maintaining international peace and security, nor the rights and obligations
of the Parties under the Charter of the United Nations.
Article 9
This Agreement shall enter into force from the date of deposit of the instruments of ratification, expressing consent to be bound by it, with the Depositary by more than a half of the signatory States. With respect to a State that deposited its instrument of ratification at a later date, this Agreement shall enter into force from the date of its deposit.
Each Party to this Agreement may withdraw from it by giving appropriate notice to the Depositary. This Agreement shall terminate for such Party [30] days after receipt of such notice by the Depositary.
This Agreement has been drawn up in Russian, English and French, all texts being equally authentic, and shall be deposited in the archive of the Depositary, which is the Government of ...
Done in [the city of …] this [XX] day of [XX] two thousand and [XX].
13. Chinese Spies Accused of Using Huawei in Secret Australia Telecom Hack
Who said Huawei was not a security threat?
Excerpts:
Now a Bloomberg News investigation has found a key piece of evidence underpinning the U.S. efforts — a previously unreported breach that occurred halfway around the world nearly a decade ago.
In 2012, Australian intelligence officials informed their U.S. counterparts that they had detected a sophisticated intrusion into the country's telecommunications systems. It began, they said, with a software update from Huawei that was loaded with malicious code.
The breach and subsequent intelligence sharing was confirmed by nearly two dozen former national security officials who received briefings about the matter from Australian and U.S. agencies from 2012 to 2019. The incident substantiated suspicions in both countries that China used Huawei equipment as a conduit for espionage, and it has remained a core part of a case they’ve built against the Chinese company, even as the breach’s existence has never been made public, the former officials said.
Chinese Spies Accused of Using Huawei in Secret Australia Telecom Hack
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government has warned for years that products from China’s Huawei Technologies Co., the world’s biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, pose a national security risk for any countries that use them. As Washington has waged a global campaign to block the company from supplying state-of-the-art 5G wireless networks, Huawei and its supporters have dismissed the claims as lacking evidence.
Now a Bloomberg News investigation has found a key piece of evidence underpinning the U.S. efforts — a previously unreported breach that occurred halfway around the world nearly a decade ago.
In 2012, Australian intelligence officials informed their U.S. counterparts that they had detected a sophisticated intrusion into the country's telecommunications systems. It began, they said, with a software update from Huawei that was loaded with malicious code.
The breach and subsequent intelligence sharing was confirmed by nearly two dozen former national security officials who received briefings about the matter from Australian and U.S. agencies from 2012 to 2019. The incident substantiated suspicions in both countries that China used Huawei equipment as a conduit for espionage, and it has remained a core part of a case they’ve built against the Chinese company, even as the breach’s existence has never been made public, the former officials said.
The episode helps clarify previously opaque security concerns driving a battle over who will build 5G networks, which promise to bring faster internet connectivity to billions of people around the globe. Shenzhen-based Huawei dominates the more than $90 billion global telecommunications equipment market, where it competes against Sweden’s Ericsson AB and Finland’s Nokia Oyj. But the U.S., Australia, Sweden and the U.K. have all banned Huawei from their 5G networks, and about 60 countries signed on to a U.S. Department of State program where they’ve committed to avoiding Chinese equipment for their telecommunications systems. Such efforts, which have also included U.S. sanctions against the Chinese company, have slowed Huawei’s growth and heightened tensions with China.
The briefings described to Bloomberg contained varying degrees of detail, and the former officials who received them had different levels of knowledge of — and willingness to discuss — specifics. Seven of them agreed to provide detailed accounts of the evidence uncovered by Australian authorities and included in their briefings.
At the core of the case, those officials said, was a software update from Huawei that was installed on the network of a major Australian telecommunications company. The update appeared legitimate, but it contained malicious code that worked much like a digital wiretap, reprogramming the infected equipment to record all the communications passing through it before sending the data to China, they said. After a few days, that code deleted itself, the result of a clever self-destruct mechanism embedded in the update, they said. Ultimately, Australia's intelligence agencies determined that China’s spy services were behind the breach, having infiltrated the ranks of Huawei technicians who helped maintain the equipment and pushed the update to the telecom’s systems.
Guided by Australia's tip, American intelligence agencies that year confirmed a similar attack from China using Huawei equipment located in the U.S., six of the former officials said, declining to provide further detail.
Mike Rogers, a former Republican congressman from Michigan who was chair of the U.S. House of Representatives intelligence committee from 2011 to 2015, declined to discuss the incidents. But he confirmed that national bans against Huawei have been driven in part by evidence, presented in private to world leaders, that China has manipulated the company’s products through tampered software updates, also known as patches.
“All their intelligence services have pored over the same material,” said Rogers, a former FBI agent who is now a national security commentator on CNN. “This whole body of work has come to the same conclusion: It's all about administrative access, and the administrative patches that come out of Beijing are not to be trusted.”
Many people familiar with Australia’s intelligence told Bloomberg that they were bound by confidentiality agreements and couldn’t discuss it on the record. But Michèle Flournoy, former under secretary of defense for policy at the Department of Defense under President Barack Obama, said she wasn’t constrained from doing so.
Flournoy, who is co-founder and managing partner of WestExec Advisors LLC, a national security consulting firm closely aligned with the Obama and Biden administrations, confirmed the intrusion and the tampered software update from Huawei. She said she learned about the episode after leaving government in early 2012, emphasizing that the information was shared in unclassified forums.
“The Australians from the get-go have been courageous in sharing the information they had, not only with the intelligence channels but more broadly in government channels,” Flournoy said. “Australia experienced it, but it was also a vicarious wake-up call for Australia’s allies.”
The Australian Signals Directorate, that country’s leading cybersecurity agency, declined to answer specific questions about the incident. “Whenever ASD discovers a cyber incident affecting an entity, it engages the relevant entity to provide advice and assistance,” the agency said in a statement. “ASD’s assistance is confidential — it is a matter for relevant entities to comment publicly on any cybersecurity incident.”
“Australia is not alone in the threats we face from state-based actors in cyberspace,” the agency said, noting that the government has “joined with others in the world to express serious concerns about malicious cyber activities by China’s Ministry of State Security.”
In the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Counterintelligence and Security Center declined to comment.
Bloomberg didn’t find evidence that Huawei’s senior leadership was involved with or aware of the attack. Huawei declined to address specific questions. “It is hard to comment on speculation and unquoted ‘senior sources,’” John Suffolk, Huawei’s global cybersecurity officer, said in a statement. “It is also hard to comment on generalizations such as ‘Australian telecommunications,’ ‘software update,’ ‘equipment,’ etc.”
But, he added, “no tangible evidence has ever been produced of any intentional wrongdoing of any kind.”
Suffolk said that Huawei’s technicians can access networks only when customers authorize it, and that customers control when updates are installed on their systems. He said Huawei considers the possibility of its workers being compromised a “valid threat” and takes steps to protect against it, including restricting access to source code and using “tamper-proofing mechanisms” to guard against abuse. “We closely monitor all of our engineers. Where the law allows we undertake additional vetting,” he said. “We control the software and equipment they use, and mandatory compliance training is required every year.”
Suffolk said that Huawei urges governments, customers and the “security ecosystem” to review its products and look for vulnerabilities, and “it is this openness and transparency that acts as a great protector.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that the country “opposes and would crack down on any forms of cyberattack and internet espionage activities in accordance with the law, not to mention refraining from encouraging, supporting or conspiring with hacking attacks.”
“Australia’s slander on China carrying out cyberattacks and espionage penetration are purely a move like a thief crying to catch a thief. This kind of arbitrary smear on another county is an extremely irresponsible action that China firmly opposes,” the ministry said. “We urge Australia not to abuse the name of ‘national security’ and put groundless accusations and unreasonable pressures on Huawei and other Chinese companies.”
Huawei was founded in 1987 by a former officer of China’s People’s Liberation Army, Ren Zhengfei, as a sales agent for business telephone systems, and over the last three decades it has grown to become the world's biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, which includes the routers, switches and cell-tower antennas used to shuttle voice and data traffic over mobile networks.
Huawei entered the Australian market in 2004 and built relationships with two of the country’s three main wireless network operators.
Australia’s dominant telecom — Melbourne-based Telstra Corp. Ltd. — has long avoided Huawei products, owing to concerns about potential Chinese tampering and the company’s partnership with Ericsson, according to three former Telstra executives. “Telstra does not have any equipment from Huawei in its network now, nor have we in the past,” the company said in a statement.
But Telstra’s two smaller rivals embraced the technology.
An early and symbolically important partner was Optus, a division of Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., which is Singapore’s biggest telecom. Optus picked Huawei for several large-scale infrastructure upgrades, starting in 2005 with a deal for digital subscriber line equipment. Optus later picked Huawei in 2007 to supply part of its nationwide 3G wireless network and in 2012 for part of its 4G network. In addition to being Australia’s second-biggest mobile carrier, Optus also operates the country’s largest fleet of satellites, and it works closely with the Australian military.
Huawei’s other key partner in Australia was Vodafone Hutchison Australia, the country’s third-biggest mobile carrier. It selected Huawei to overhaul its entire 2G and 3G infrastructure in 2011 and later for parts of its 4G networks as well.
The identity of the telecom impacted by the breach in Australia wasn't shared widely in the briefings by Australian and U.S. intelligence officials, according to the people who received them. But a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Australian telecommunications executive who worked in a national security role said they were told it was Optus.
Optus disputed the information. “Optus has a strong track record of providing trusted and secure services, including to major government agencies. These are delivered in close collaboration with government and with strict adherence to its advice on security matters,” the company said in a statement. “Optus takes security very seriously. Any incidents of breaches or inappropriate vendor behavior would be taken into account in our network investment decisions, but we have no knowledge of the alleged incidents.”
After a 2020 merger, Vodafone Hutchison Australia became TPG Telecom Ltd. The company said it wasn’t aware of an attack. “We can confirm that there was no such malware in our network, and we have never heard of this alleged incident in respect of any Australian networks,” the company said in a statement. “We comply with all directions and advice from the Australian government in relation to national security.”
Starting around 2010, officials in Australia and the U.S. had grown alarmed by two trends: the rising number of hacking attacks from China and Huawei’s expanding role in their countries’ telecommunications systems, according to Michael Wessel, who for more than 20 years has been a commissioner on the congressionally created U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The commission examines national security implications of the trade and economic relationships between the two countries and reports its recommendations.
The countries began investigating whether any of those hacks traced back to Huawei equipment, he said.
“If there’s a locksmith who’s installing more and more locks on the doors in a community and suddenly there’s a rash of silent robberies, at some point the locksmith becomes a person of interest,” Wessel said. “Huawei around that time became a significant entity of interest.”
By that point, the NSA had already penetrated Huawei’s corporate networks in China, looking for evidence of any links between the company and China’s military, according to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published in news articles in 2014. Under a program called Shotgiant, the U.S. monitored e-mail accounts belonging to Huawei employees including Ren, the company’s founder. NSA also looked for ways to exploit Huawei products in Chinese-built networks in countries considered high-priority intelligence targets, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Kenya and Pakistan, according to the documents and articles.
Huawei’s Suffolk said in his statement that “no such evidence was ever presented that demonstrated Huawei was anything other than highly professional and that our founder Mr. Ren has many, many boring e-mails.”
Concerned about potential intrusion into its communications systems, Australia began taking a harder line on Huawei and China. In particular, Australia blocked Huawei from participating in massive project to build a nationwide broadband network, a surprise decision that triggered a diplomatic uproar when the news leaked in early 2012. Then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the decision involved “national security matters” that she couldn’t discuss. Gillard declined to comment for this story.
Around that time, Australia discovered the breach — an extraordinary find given the hackers' efforts to cover their tracks.
The seven former officials who provided detailed accounts of their briefings said that Australia’s intelligence agencies had detected suspicious traffic flowing from the country’s telecommunications systems to China, a trail that led to Huawei equipment. Investigators gained access to some of the infected systems, but they arrived too late. Digital forensics on those systems revealed only fragments of the malicious code’s existence, and investigators reconstructed the attack using a variety of sensitive sources, including human informants and secretly intercepted conversations, the former officials said.
The attackers had siphoned all the data flowing through the equipment during the malware's short window of operation, the former officials said. The data gave them access to the contents of private communications and information that could be used to target specific people or devices in future attacks, the former officials said. Bloomberg was unable to learn what, if anything, the attackers did with it.
Also in 2012, around the time Australian officials were briefing U.S. agencies about the breach, the intelligence committee of the House of Representatives published findings that China’s spy services had a “wealth of opportunities” to tamper with products from Huawei and a similar company, ZTE Corp., from their design to their maintenance on customer networks. One of those involves so-called managed services, a common offering where companies provide ongoing support, including remote software updates, for their equipment after it’s installed at customer sites, the report found. “Unfortunately, such contracts may also allow the managed-service contractor to use its authorized access for malicious activity under the guise of legitimate assistance,” the report found.
Huawei and ZTE don’t need to be a participant in — or even be aware of — any attacks for them to occur through their employee ranks. “Chinese intelligence services need only recruit working-level technicians or managers in these companies” to carry out compromises of customer networks, the report found.
At the time, Huawei said the report “employs many rumors and speculations to prove nonexistent accusations,” while a ZTE spokesman said that after a year-long investigation, “the committee rests its conclusions on a finding that ZTE may not be ‘free of state influence.’” That standard “would apply to any company operating in China,” the spokesman said.
In the years since then, various reports have linked Huawei or its employees to spying and surveillance. In 2019, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported that Huawei technicians, in at least two instances, helped African governments spy on political opponents, intercepting their encrypted communications and using cellphone data to track their locations. Last year, Australia’s Financial Review found that Huawei built a facility to store the entire data archive for the Papua New Guinea government, but it contained glaring security gaps that exposed sensitive files to being stolen. And on Dec. 14, the Washington Post published documents from Huawei showing that the company has played a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged.
Huawei denied each of the reports, and the company has consistently pushed back against allegations that its products pose a security risk.
“Huawei has not had any major cybersecurity incidents while working with more than 500 telecom providers, including most of the top 50 telecom operators, for nearly 20 years in 170 countries to connect more than 3 billion people,” the company says on its website. “No other vendor can claim this level of cybersecurity success.”
Keith Krach, the former under secretary for economic growth, energy and the environment at the U.S. Department of State under President Donald Trump, declined to discuss specific incidents. But he confirmed that the U.S. and its allies have had evidence for years that China has manipulated Huawei equipment through software updates.
“Huawei has thrown a lot of head fakes by saying it would never put a back door in the hardware — a back door means nothing because there's a front door that's open every day through software,” he said. “Huawei’s software updates can push whatever code they want into those machines, whenever they want, without anyone knowing.”
That characterization is a “fantasy,” said Huawei’s Suffolk. “There is not a general software update mechanism, patches are not pushed at will and Huawei has no control or say when an operator decides to upgrade or patch their network,” he said.
In Australia, after nearly a decade of hostility with the government, Huawei has abandoned many of its operations. Last year, the company revealed a $100 million financial cut to its Australian investment and more than 1,000 local job losses, according to the Financial Review. A key factor behind that 5G ban, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, was an intelligence assessment that the vulnerabilities associated with Huawei products were so severe that more than 300 separate risks would need to be mitigated in order to use it securely.
In Huawei’s statement to Bloomberg, the company said that former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull publicly stated that “no evidence had been provided to demonstrate that Huawei had undertaken anything untoward in Australia.” In his memoir, which was published in 2020, Turnbull wrote that his administration's 5G ban against Huawei was a “hedge against a future threat, not the identification of a smoking gun, but a loaded one.”
Turnbull, in a statement to Bloomberg, rejected Huawei's characterization. “That is not what I have said — I made no comment as to whether evidence of untoward conduct by Huawei had been presented or observed,” he said. “So I was, if you like, deliberately making no comment on that point at all.”
Turnbull declined to comment about the 2012 incident or any other intelligence matters related to Huawei.
Australia continues to deal with the fallout from challenging China on a range of issues, including Huawei.
China has imposed damaging one-sided tariffs on Australian commodities, and Chinese hackers have targeted Australian institutions with relentless attacks since the country called last year for an independent probe into the origins of Covid-19. Australia also announced a pact in September with the U.S. to build nuclear-powered submarines, a challenge to China’s growing military presence that has further heightened tensions in the region.
Flournoy, the former Defense Department official under Obama, said China continues to punish Australia in part because of it longstanding position on Huawei, which was informed in part by the breach the country discovered nearly a decade ago.
“They didn’t do the typical thing of trying to hide the vulnerability; they talked about what happened with their closest allies and took a public stand,” Flournoy said. “They are still taking a hit for it.”
(Updates to give Christopher Cannon an assist)
14. This Army Reservist’s Formula Predicts the Inside Layout of Buildings from Satellite Photos
This Army Reservist’s Formula Predicts the Inside Layout of Buildings from Satellite Photos
From the presentation AI/ML Floor Plan Predictor – Primer by Christian Lance Relleve, Christian Lance Relleve,
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The ability to predict the placement of stairs, rooms, etc., could be a big help to tactical teams.
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December 16, 2021 06:41 PM ET
Technology Editor
December 16, 2021 06:41 PM ET
When Navy SEALs or other operators plan raids, a lot of work goes into bringing down the number of unknowns—say, how many people are in the house, or where they might hide to stage an ambush. A new formula promises to help with the latter by predicting a building’s internal structure from its external appearance.
The formula was one of the five winners of the most recent Dragon’s Lair competition, a search for innovative ideas held quarterly at the Army’s Fort Bragg in North Carolina. It was developed by Christian Lance Relleve, a Navy architect who is also a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve.
Factors such as building materials, symmetry and the placement of entries and exits can indicate the location of key internal features like stairs, and supporting walls, even bathrooms. Small and high-placed windows are much more likely to be bathrooms whereas larger ones are more likely to be offices, etc. The roof color also suggests the material used and the location of supporting structures underneath. Revelle told Defense One that countries run by autocratic regimes, in particular, make heavy use of repetition: a string of buildings of similar size and shape are likely to have similar internal plans.
Relleve began working on the formula in 2019 and soon drew the attention of defense contractors. Instead of selling it, he sought military support to keep developing to develop it on his own.
He said that his formula can predict a more-or-less symmetrical building’s internal structure with roughly 70 percent accuracy, but he acknowledged that it doesn’t work well for buildings that are asymmetrical.
The next step will be to apply machine learning to the dataset of building types and features to train algorithms to predict internal layout more accurately and quickly.
The military has said that urban warfare will be a defining characteristic of future conflict. Being able to predict the layouts of buildings would be a big boost to not only dismounted tactical teams of soldiers but also in planning more precise drone strikes. He next wants to work on an “economy of force” calculator to output predictions for how much human or fire-power might be needed to destroy a certain target in a certain location causing minimal risk to surrounding entities.
15. US accuses Chinese tech firms, research institutes of weaponizing biotechnology, creating 'brain-control weaponry'
We have the military industrial congressional complex (MICC) and the Chinese have their "civilian-military fusion strategy."
Excerpts:
While the majority of the blacklisted firms were designated because of their ties to China's so-called "civilian-military fusion strategy," where civilian fields like medicine and biotechnology are allegedly weaponized to support the military, a handful were also designated for exporting sensitive technology to Iran.
That strategy has alarmed U.S. officials in recent years, starting with the Trump administration, which launched a robust all-of-government effort to stymie it. That included deploying this Commerce Department blacklist repeatedly to ban U.S. exports to Chinese firms that the People's Liberation Army could then access.
The Biden administration has carried that policy on and expanded it -- announcing last week during Biden's Summit for Democracy a small group of countries committed to blocking similar technology exports to China, including the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.
US accuses Chinese tech firms, research institutes of weaponizing biotechnology, creating 'brain-control weaponry'
The Biden administration has blacklisted and sanctioned dozens of Chinese government research institutes and private-sector tech firms, accusing them of weaponizing technology for use at home and abroad, the U.S. departments of Commerce and Treasury announced Thursday.
In particular, the U.S. warned that these entities were working as part of a broader Chinese government strategy to develop and deploy biotechnology, including "brain-control weaponry," for possible offensive use and as part of its crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities -- a campaign that the U.S. has determined constitutes genocide.
The penalties seek to bar U.S. technology from being exported to these projects or block their access to the U.S. financial system.
"The scientific pursuit of biotechnology and medical innovation can save lives. Unfortunately, the PRC is choosing to use these technologies to pursue control over its people and its repression of members of ethnic and religious minority groups," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, using an acronym for China's formal name, the People's Republic of China.
"We cannot allow U.S. commodities, technologies, and software that support medical science and biotechnical innovation to be diverted toward uses contrary to U.S. national security," she added in a statement.
Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
A Chinese soldier stands guard at an entrance to the headquarters of the People's Liberation Army in Hong Kong, Oct. 7, 2019.
In total, 12 Chinese research institutes and 22 Chinese tech firms have been blacklisted by her agency and barred from any exports or transfers of U.S. technology, except in limited cases with a license. Chief among them is China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences and its 11 research institutes.
Taken together, they "use biotechnology processes to support Chinese military end uses and end users, to include purported brain-control weaponry," the Commerce Department said in its public notice Thursday.
It's unclear what kind of weaponry might already exist, but Chinese military leaders have talked for years about biotechnology as creating new "offensive capability," including "brain control" weapons and "specific ethnic genetic attacks."
"China's research focus on these technologies is not unique. What is unique is their declared intent to weaponize their inventions," said retired Lt. Col. Stephen Ganyard, the former top U.S. diplomat for military affairs.
These inventions could include "the stuff of science fiction, such as brain-controlled weaponry" that would allow "a Chinese commando to discharge a weapon with just a thought, not a trigger finger," according to Craig Singleton, a former U.S. diplomat who is now an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.
That could give China military and intelligence advances over the U.S., per Singleton, although it's unclear if the Pentagon is developing similar weapons programs.
LightRocket via Getty Images, FILE
Riot policemen stop and search protesters during a demonstration in Hong Kong, Sept. 12, 2019.
"Some of these technologies may not be easily contained and could have disastrous second- and third-order consequences on civilian populations. China's seeking to weaponize advanced technologies is putting the whole world at risk of unforeseen and uncontainable consequences," added Ganyard, an ABC News contributor.
For now, it seems China has focused their alleged use against domestic targets, including the Uighurs in the country's westernmost province, known formally as Xinjiang.
"Private firms in China's defense and surveillance technology sectors are actively cooperating with the government's efforts to repress members of ethnic and religious minority groups," said Brian Nelson, the senior Treasury Department official for terrorism and financial intelligence.
The Treasury Department designated eight more private firms, cutting them off from the U.S. financial system and threatening sanctions on those that do business with them, for reportedly working with Xinjiang authorities.
That includes developing facial recognition software, cloud computing, drones, and GPS technology, among other artificial intelligence tools.
"One such AI software could recognize persons as being part of the Uyghur ethnic minority and send automated alarms to government authorities," according to the Treasury, while another firm helped "develop a transcription and translation tool for the Uyghur language to enable authorities to scan electronic devices."
Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images, FILE
Xi Jinping learns about the progress on the vaccine and anti-body research during his visit to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing, March 20, 2020.
It's estimated between one and nearly two million Uighurs and other minorities, like Kazakhs, have been detained in mass "re-education" camps where they are used as forced labor and are taught Chinese Communist Party propaganda.
In addition, independent researchers, Uighur activists, and the U.S. government have accused China of a mass sterilization campaign to sink Uighur birth rates, which have declined precipitously in recent years.
While the majority of the blacklisted firms were designated because of their ties to China's so-called "civilian-military fusion strategy," where civilian fields like medicine and biotechnology are allegedly weaponized to support the military, a handful were also designated for exporting sensitive technology to Iran.
That strategy has alarmed U.S. officials in recent years, starting with the Trump administration, which launched a robust all-of-government effort to stymie it. That included deploying this Commerce Department blacklist repeatedly to ban U.S. exports to Chinese firms that the People's Liberation Army could then access.
The Biden administration has carried that policy on and expanded it -- announcing last week during Biden's Summit for Democracy a small group of countries committed to blocking similar technology exports to China, including the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.
16. The End of the Afghanistan War Was Even Worse Than Anyone Realized
Based on part 1 of the New Yorker article this week. I am waiting for part 2.
Excerpts:
Duplicity reigned in this war from the very beginning. President George W. Bush and his crew thought the war was over when the anti-Taliban rebels conquered Kabul and a Western-chosen president, Hamid Karzai, was installed, thus allowing U.S. troops to thin out and invade Iraq. In fact, the Taliban, who had never left, resumed the fight. Under President Barack Obama, when the U.S. effort escalated and switched to a strategy of nation-building, the generals sent rosy-eyed assessments from the front, claiming progress and promising more, knowing that they were at the very least exaggerating. (Obama eventually caught on, drew down the troops, and switched to a less ambitious strategy.) Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan; his negotiator tried to maneuver the Taliban into a deal that gave a win to all parties, but he was the one maneuvered. Biden’s team thought—or pretended to think (it’s unclear which)—that a semblance of victory could be pried from abject defeat. All of these players were dishonest, with their allies, their adversaries, and, most damagingly, themselves.
“The first casualty when war comes is truth,” some wag remarked more than 100 years ago. Those who skirt the truth might have in mind the line from Aeschylus in the fifth century B.C.: “God is not averse to deceit in a holy cause.” Self-delusion is an ennobling way to continue justifying these evasions. The patterns are probably inevitable in warfare, especially among the leaders who are shocked to find themselves on the losing side.
Democracies are equipped with the tools and safeguards—oversight, investigations, legislative control over the budget, and, in the case of U.S. democracy, the War Powers Act—to contain the spread of these evasions. Voters and lawmakers should use these tools more often.
The End of the Afghanistan War Was Even Worse Than Anyone Realized
Slate · by Fred Kaplan · December 17, 2021
It is now widely conceded that America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest in our history, was a tragic bungle of monumental proportions. However, we are just beginning to learn that the final phase of the war—not so much the frantic evacuation but the entire last three years, as we tiptoed toward the exits—was disgraceful in its own appalling way.
The unsettling details are documented by Steve Coll and Adam Entous, whose long article, “The Secret History of the U.S. Diplomatic Failure in Afghanistan,” appears in the most recent New Yorker. Coll is the author of Ghost Wars, not just the best book on the run-up to the Sept. 11 attacks, but one of the best books on U.S. foreign policy ever. The New Yorker article, he notes, is based on hundreds of pages of mostly classified meeting notes, transcripts, memoranda, and emails, as well as interviews with U.S. and Afghan officials.
This vast pile of evidence, Coll and Entous write, amounts to “a dispiriting record of misjudgment, hubris, and delusion.” They could have added to that list of adjectives: self-delusion, incompetence, and sheer mendacity. Not that getting out of Afghanistan was a bad idea. But the way our leaders got out should shock even a jaded observer of shady politics.
Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as well as some of their top aides, come off rather badly in the article. It is no secret that Trump wanted out of Afghanistan from the get-go. After a brief spell, when his generals convinced him to try out their new strategy of victory (which was neither new nor much of a strategy), he hired Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born-and-bred diplomat (and former U.S. ambassador to Kabul), to negotiate a deal with the Taliban. The real goal of these talks, an aide to Khalilzad told the New Yorker reporters, was to get our troops out of there in six to nine months.
Khalilzad is a well-known Washington figure, an experienced operator with a debonair flair. In this story, he’s also a self-aggrandizing snake. It has long been reported that he kept Afghan President Ashraf Ghani out of his negotiations with the Taliban; that’s what Trump wanted him to do. It turns out he kept U.S. officials in the dark as well. Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq, is quoted as likening Khalilzad’s evasive approach to an Arab proverb: “It is good to know the truth and speak it, but it is better to know the truth and speak of palm trees.”
In September 2019, a car bomb exploded in Kabul, killing a dozen people, including an American soldier. In response, Trump called off the negotiations, to the relief of many U.S. officials, who thought the talks were giving too much to the Taliban. Khalilzad was ordered home. Instead, he secured the release of two professors—an American and an Australian, who had been kidnapped a few years earlier. Pleased by the feat, Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, allowed Khalilzad to resume the peace talks.
Khalilzad reentered the talks with unearned arrogance. As Coll and Entous report, one of Ghani’s aides urged him to change his approach. The Taliban, he warned, weren’t interested in a political settlement; they were, rather, “on a victory march.” Khalilzad told the aide not to worry. “I’ve cornered them,” he said. “There will be a political settlement.” Of course, there was no such thing.
Under the deal that Khalilzad signed, the Taliban agreed not to attack U.S. troops as they were withdrawing, but they were expressly allowed to continue fighting Afghan troops. The Taliban also insisted that the Afghan government free 5,000 prisoners. U.S. military officers who took part in the negotiations vowed to walk out if the Taliban got the release without agreeing to a cease-fire. Khalilzad, though, agreed to the release; the Taliban wouldn’t agree to a cease-fire; the talks continued anyway.
Ghani complained to Pompeo, who pressed Ghani to release the prisoners anyway. Pompeo assured Ghani that U.S. troops would leave “only when there is a political resolution.” However, according to the New Yorker, Pompeo added that this promise might be revoked “if we have no progress in the talks.” It turned out there was no progress in the talks, mainly because the Taliban didn’t want progress, so Pompeo felt he wasn’t being duplicitous when his commitment wasn’t honored.
As should have been clear at the time, an unconditional U.S. withdrawal clinched the collapse of the Afghan military and, with it, the government. Once U.S. troops started to withdraw, American contractors—no longer having the troops’ protection—pulled out as well. Without the contractors, the Afghan air force could no longer maintain their planes or helicopters. Coll and Entous report that officers at U.S. Central Command offered to provide “tele-maintenance,” talking Afghan officers through maintenance procedures over the phone. They also offered to set up an aircraft repair shop in the United Arab Emirates—1,000 miles away, beyond the range of most Afghan planes. Were they serious, cynical, harebrained? Hard to say.
In any case, by the time Joe Biden entered the White House, the Afghan government was doomed. During the transition, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken, who would become national security adviser and secretary of state respectively, warned Biden in a memo that the peace talks were going nowhere. They were fully aware of what was happening. Still, Biden asked Khalilzad to stay on as emissary, at least through the spring, for continuity’s sake.
Two days after Biden’s inauguration, Sullivan assured Ghani’s national security adviser that if the Taliban didn’t get serious at the peace talks, “they will bear the consequences of their choices.” Sullivan explained that this did not mean the U.S. would “escalate the conflict”—only that we would “take a hard-nosed look at the situation.” The level of cliché here is remarkable.
Meanwhile, Blinken and Khalilzad discussed a new idea: abandoning the peace talks and skipping ahead to a summit in Turkey, where the Taliban and Ghani’s government would negotiate a peace-sharing deal. That called for a new constitution, a transition government, new courts, and a national conference. Blinken told Biden he wanted to explore the idea of delaying the U.S. troop withdrawal until after the Turkey summit—before anyone had agreed to hold such a summit. Did either Khalilzad or Blinken think this plan was remotely plausible?
On April 15, the day after Biden announced the coming withdrawal of all U.S. troops, the Taliban announced they would not attend any summit in Turkey. (Why should they? The game was over, and they’d won.) On Aug. 5, as the withdrawal date neared, Blinken assured Ghani that Khalilzad was working on yet another proposal to the Taliban—a one-month cease-fire in exchange for the freeing of another 3,000 prisoners. Ghani rejected the unserious idea out of hand.
The next day, the Taliban captured the capital of Nimruz province. The following day, the U.S. Embassy urged all Americans to leave the country. On Aug. 10, Ghani, who was still trying to boost the morale of his Cabinet and citizens, announced a new infrastructure project on his Facebook page. Leaders in Washington and Kabul were living in a fantasy—or pretending that they were.
Five days later, the Taliban entered Kabul in force, and Ghani fled the country. On Aug. 30, the last of the U.S. troops—who had been reinforced for the sole purpose of handling a massive evacuation—left the country as well. The 20-year war was over, at least for us.
Duplicity reigned in this war from the very beginning. President George W. Bush and his crew thought the war was over when the anti-Taliban rebels conquered Kabul and a Western-chosen president, Hamid Karzai, was installed, thus allowing U.S. troops to thin out and invade Iraq. In fact, the Taliban, who had never left, resumed the fight. Under President Barack Obama, when the U.S. effort escalated and switched to a strategy of nation-building, the generals sent rosy-eyed assessments from the front, claiming progress and promising more, knowing that they were at the very least exaggerating. (Obama eventually caught on, drew down the troops, and switched to a less ambitious strategy.) Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan; his negotiator tried to maneuver the Taliban into a deal that gave a win to all parties, but he was the one maneuvered. Biden’s team thought—or pretended to think (it’s unclear which)—that a semblance of victory could be pried from abject defeat. All of these players were dishonest, with their allies, their adversaries, and, most damagingly, themselves.
“The first casualty when war comes is truth,” some wag remarked more than 100 years ago. Those who skirt the truth might have in mind the line from Aeschylus in the fifth century B.C.: “God is not averse to deceit in a holy cause.” Self-delusion is an ennobling way to continue justifying these evasions. The patterns are probably inevitable in warfare, especially among the leaders who are shocked to find themselves on the losing side.
Democracies are equipped with the tools and safeguards—oversight, investigations, legislative control over the budget, and, in the case of U.S. democracy, the War Powers Act—to contain the spread of these evasions. Voters and lawmakers should use these tools more often.
Slate · by Fred Kaplan · December 17, 2021
17. At Least 458 U.S. Crimes Tied to Extremism Involved Veterans, Active Duty Troops
Excerpts:
Spikes in domestic terrorism also occured after previous military conflicts, Braniff said.
“The overwhelming majority of veterans came home from the wars of the last few decades, and are contributing to American society in amazing ways,” he said. “But a small number are also over-represented among violent extremists. And so really, the question before us is recognizing the cyclical pattern of wars and domestic terrorism. Are we willing to compete for the next veteran, and tell them that we love them…or are we going to let the local militia win?”
Braniff and others have formed We the Veterans, which along with the University of Maryland has advised DOD as it conducted its extremism review, which is expected to be released before the end of the year.
But the review itself is a sensitive undertaking; any efforts by the Biden-administration Pentagon to address extremism in the ranks will likely face political criticism that the military is becoming “too woke.”
At Least 458 U.S. Crimes Tied to Extremism Involved Veterans, Active Duty Troops
The “underlying factors are not going away,” says one researcher.
The number of people with military backgrounds who committed criminal acts motivated by extremist views has jumped during the last ten years, according to new research at the University of Maryland. Without intervention, experts worry, those numbers will continue to rise.
What they want to do is get ahead of the problem, and increase outreach to this new generation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to get them engaged and supported to prevent any allure of extremist groups from taking hold.
“It's very easy to say, well, Charlottesville, and 2020 and 2021, those were anomalies,” said William Braniff, an Army veteran who leads the university’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START. “I think they're a reflection of the political climate in the United States, and veterans are a subset, a cross section of America. They reflect the same trend lines that we're seeing in the broader American population. So I don't think we're seeing, I don't think this is some sort of blip that will completely reverse itself in any sense.”
START’s latest report, released Wednesday, identifies 458 people with military backgrounds who were either arrested, charged, or indicted after committing criminal acts that were motivated by extremist political, economic, social, or religious goals since 1990.
That total includes 107 veterans and 11 others with military ties, including “one active-duty Marine, two Army Reservists, two Army National Guard members, two Marine Reservists, two Civil Air Patrol Cadets, and one member of the Army and one member of the Air Force who enlisted after January 6, 2021,” the study found.
But even if the Jan. 6 military participants are removed from the data set, the researchers found, the average number of people with military backgrounds who engage in those criminal acts has jumped from 6.9 to 17.7 per year.
“And why? We just concluded the two longest wars in U.S. history, unsatisfactorily, in two Muslim-majority countries in a hyperpolarized moment in American history. So those underlying factors are not going away,” Braniff said.
Before the year is out, the Pentagon is expected to release an internal review ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on extremism within the ranks and new guidelines for commanders on how to deal with troops who embrace extremist views.
Braniff and several other groups are looking closely at how extremism takes hold..
What they’ve found is that some newly separated service members are falling through the cracks. Due to privacy concerns, their contact information is no longer shared with government-affiliated veterans service organizations, which have a harder time finding and connecting with them.
That lack of connection can be compounding. Most of the veterans known to have joined extremist groups did so about 10 years after separating from the military, and many had a history of trying unsuccessfully to maintain jobs and relationships.
To conduct the research, the consortium pulled data from police reports, court records, and news reports in all 50 states. It’s likely the data set did not capture all arrests, because some state and county records were either difficult to obtain or did not identify military service, Braniff said.
Spikes in domestic terrorism also occured after previous military conflicts, Braniff said.
“The overwhelming majority of veterans came home from the wars of the last few decades, and are contributing to American society in amazing ways,” he said. “But a small number are also over-represented among violent extremists. And so really, the question before us is recognizing the cyclical pattern of wars and domestic terrorism. Are we willing to compete for the next veteran, and tell them that we love them…or are we going to let the local militia win?”
Braniff and others have formed We the Veterans, which along with the University of Maryland has advised DOD as it conducted its extremism review, which is expected to be released before the end of the year.
But the review itself is a sensitive undertaking; any efforts by the Biden-administration Pentagon to address extremism in the ranks will likely face political criticism that the military is becoming “too woke.”
It also will arrive as the Defense Department is trying to get its force fully vaccinated from Covid —but now seven Republican governors are rejecting the Pentagon’s authority to require vaccines for their National Guard troops.
When asked Thursday whether the Pentagon was worried that service members who are forced out of the military because they refuse the vaccine might become radicalized, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said maintaining readiness outweighed that risk.
“While it may be a political issue in society, it's not a political issue here in the United States military,” Kirby said. “It is a valid military medical requirement, and it is a lawful order.”
“The extreme opposite view of your question would be that we wouldn't enforce this lawful order, this medical requirement, because we'd be worried that we might radicalize a member of the armed forces.”
18. The American People Want Realism And Restraint
Whew. I guess Korea was not important enough to make the poll.
Excerpts:
Beyond matters of NATO, Russia, and Ukraine, it seems the public’s perception is moving towards one of restraint when it comes to the bigger picture of America’s role in the world as the focal point of geopolitics shifts eastward from Europe and the Middle East to China. A plurality (40%) said the U.S. should be “less engaged” when asked if the U.S. should “be more or less militarily engaged in conflicts around the world, or stay about the same?” Nearly another third of respondents believed our engagement in military conflicts should remain the same, while only 10% believed the U.S. should be more engaged. Another 18% said they didn’t know. Furthermore, 73% of respondents agreed that our focus right now should be on solving domestic problems, rather than focusing on foreign policy issues. Just 7% said foreign policy issues should take precedence over the domestic in our current moment.
The poll was commissioned by the Charles Koch Institute and surveyed 1000 U.S. adults between Dec. 9 and 13 with a margin of error of +/- 3.4%.
Whether or not the foreign policy blob listens to the will of the American people remains to be seen, and with the current crisis of incompetence and unaccountability throughout its ranks, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t. But, for the sake of our soldiers and their families, let’s hope they do.
The American People Want Realism And Restraint - The American Conservative
The American People Want Realism And Restraint
A new YouGov poll found that not only do the American people do not want war with Russia over Ukraine, but that big-picture attitudes on America's role in the world is moving in a restraint direction.
December 17, 2021
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5:00 pm
Russia has positioned large numbers of troops on its border with Ukraine, raising the specter of a Russian invasion, to which the foreign policy establishment in Washington has kept all its options, even military options, on the table. However, a new poll from YouGov suggests that the American people are not with the interventionists that control our foreign policy elite when it comes to militarily defending Ukraine.
The YouGov poll found that just 27% of respondents either “strongly” or “somewhat favor” going to war with Russia over protecting the territorial integrity of Ukraine, while 58% either “strongly” or “somewhat oppose.” Another 24% said they did not know. Across demographic indicators such as gender, race, and educational attainment, a plurality of respondents in each subcategory said they would be opposed to going to war with Russia over Ukraine.
With respect to age, a higher percentage of respondents ages 18-29 said they would favor going to war with Russia to protect Ukraine compared to other age groups, although a plurality of respondents 18-29 still opposed such a war. Opposition to getting into an armed conflict with Ukraine increased among each subsequent age grouping, with 40.8% of respondents 30-44, 51.1% of respondents 45-64, and 61.4% of respondents 65 and older saying they either “somewhat” or “strongly oppose” a war with Russia over Ukraine.
“The United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine and continuing to take actions that increase the risk of a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia is therefore not necessary for our security,” Will Ruger, Vice President of Research and Policy at the Charles Koch Institute, said of the survey results. “After more than two decades of endless war abroad, it is not surprising there is wariness among the American people for yet another war that wouldn’t make us safer or more prosperous.”
Furthermore, when respondents were asked whether or not the current level of U.S. troops in Europe was appropriate, just 10.4% said the U.S. should increase its number of troops in Europe, while 32.6% said those numbers should be decreased. Another 37.4% said the number should remain the same. Also, when prefaced with the fact that the U.S. accounts for 70% of all defense spending by NATO countries, 60.5% of respondents said that America’s European allies should contribute more to their defense, while only 8.3% said less, and 31.2% said they do not know.
Beyond matters of NATO, Russia, and Ukraine, it seems the public’s perception is moving towards one of restraint when it comes to the bigger picture of America’s role in the world as the focal point of geopolitics shifts eastward from Europe and the Middle East to China. A plurality (40%) said the U.S. should be “less engaged” when asked if the U.S. should “be more or less militarily engaged in conflicts around the world, or stay about the same?” Nearly another third of respondents believed our engagement in military conflicts should remain the same, while only 10% believed the U.S. should be more engaged. Another 18% said they didn’t know. Furthermore, 73% of respondents agreed that our focus right now should be on solving domestic problems, rather than focusing on foreign policy issues. Just 7% said foreign policy issues should take precedence over the domestic in our current moment.
The poll was commissioned by the Charles Koch Institute and surveyed 1000 U.S. adults between Dec. 9 and 13 with a margin of error of +/- 3.4%.
Whether or not the foreign policy blob listens to the will of the American people remains to be seen, and with the current crisis of incompetence and unaccountability throughout its ranks, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t. But, for the sake of our soldiers and their families, let’s hope they do.
about the author
Bradley Devlin is a Staff Reporter for The American Conservative. Previously, he was an Analysis Reporter for the Daily Caller, and has been published in the Daily Wire and the Daily Signal, among other publications that don't include the word "Daily." He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Political Economy. You can follow Bradley on Twitter @bradleydevlin.
19. Navy: No Honorable Discharge for Maverick Marine Scheller
Navy: No Honorable Discharge for Maverick Marine Scheller
Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller , the maverick US Marine who blasted the brass, won’t get an honorable discharge. He’ll exit the service with a general under honorable conditions characterization.
That decision was reached by Robert D. Hogue, the principal deputy assistant Navy secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, in a letter dated Dec. 16, 2021.
Scheller pleaded guilty Oct. 14 at a special court-martial trial in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, copping to a string of stinging social media posts that called into question the character and competence of civilian and flag officer leaders who oversaw counterinsurgency wars for two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A military judge sentenced him the next day to forfeit $5,000 in pay and to be reprimanded. On Nov. 23, Scheller submitted a written request to exit the Corps with an honorable discharge, conceding that he was “not a victim” and that he made choices “understanding full well the implication of actions.”
A career infantry officer, Scheller served nearly 17 years and was decorated for battlefield bravery, an exemplary record in uniform that Hogue said he strongly considered before deciding the Marine’s “misconduct and its deleterious effect on good order and discipline” outweighed it.
Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller arrives for his special court-martial trial on Oct. 15, 2021, at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Coffee or Die Magazine photo by Noelle Wiehe.
“When Lt. Col. Scheller began making statements on social media about senior military and civilian leaders, he served as a commanding officer in the US Marine Corps,” wrote Hogue. “By naval tradition and regulation, commanding officers are expected to enforce good order and discipline through both their orders and example. Lt. Col. Scheller’s decision to advocate for ‘revolution’ in addition to voicing contempt for senior leaders directly conflicted with his duties as a commanding officer.
“Members of Lt. Col. Scheller’s command and servicemembers of all paygrades throughout the armed forces saw his advocacy to defy lawful military and civilian authority, amplified by his rank and position. Further, Lt. Col. Scheller persisted in making public statements after his commanding officer ordered him to stop. Such conduct is anathema to the duties of any commissioned officer, let alone a commanding officer.”
Scheller’s attorney, Timothy C. Parlatore, told Coffee or Die Magazine that the Marine’s legal team had hoped for an honorable discharge and are disappointed that the Department of the Navy “failed to consider the significant mitigating factors that the court properly considered,”
During sentencing, Marine Reserve Judge Col. Glen R. Hines voiced concerns about the “specter of unlawful command influence” in Scheller’s case. He pointed to the leak of the lieutenant colonel’s medical records to a media outlet, including mental health notes, as a “very disturbing,” “unfair,” and “illegal” scandal that needed to be investigated.
Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller pleaded guilty at a special court-martial after being charged with multiple violations of military law for a series of videos and social media posts belittling his chain of command. Screen grab from a Scheller video.
Termed the “mortal enemy of military justice” by higher courts, unlawful command influence happens when leaders utter words or take actions that illegally guide the outcome of court-martial trials or undermine the public’s confidence in the armed forces by appearing to tip the scales of justice.
Scheller couldn’t contest his verdict, sentence, or discharge because he waived away that right when he pleaded to the violations of military law.
“This decision reflects more care for the bruised egos of the generals who lost the wars than the mental and emotional health of the servicemembers who actually fought the wars,” Parlatore said.
“The judge actually studied the evidence and said that he saw a Marine in pain. In contrast, the Navy and Marine Corps leadership demonstrated that they care little for the mental and emotional health of their people.”
Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller pleaded guilty on Oct. 14, 2021, at a special court-martial after being charged with multiple violations of military law. Photo courtesy of The Pipe Hitter Foundation.
Hogue seemed persuaded by a three-page report forwarded to him by Lt. Gen. David A. Ottignon, the Marines’ deputy commandant for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. The three-star general warned that Scheller’s misconduct demonstrated he “has no potential for future service and outweighs the positive aspects of his career.”
And despite the military leaks that appeared to improperly paint Scheller as mentally unbalanced, Ottignon’s report specifically noted that the lieutenant colonel had been screened for both Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury, and suffered from neither invisible wound of war.
Scheller is expected to exit the Marine Corps within the next four weeks.
20. Opinion | 3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection
Opinion | 3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection
Paul D. Eaton is a retired U.S. Army major general and a senior adviser to VoteVets. Antonio M. Taguba is a retired Army major general, with 34 years of active duty service. Steven M. Anderson is a retired brigadier general who served in the U.S. Army for 31 years.
As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we — all of us former senior military officials — are increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk.
In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.
One of our military’s strengths is that it draws from our diverse population. It is a collection of individuals, all with different beliefs and backgrounds. But without constant maintenance, the potential for a military breakdown mirroring societal or political breakdown is very real.
The signs of potential turmoil in our armed forces are there. On Jan. 6, a disturbing number of veterans and active-duty members of the military took part in the attack on the Capitol. More than 1 in 10 of those charged in the attacks had a service record. A group of 124 retired military officials, under the name “Flag Officers 4 America,” released a letter echoing Donald Trump’s false attacks on the legitimacy of our elections.
Recently, and perhaps more worrying, Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino, the commanding general of the Oklahoma National Guard, refused an order from President Biden mandating that all National Guard members be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Mancino claimed that while the Oklahoma Guard is not federally mobilized, his commander in chief is the Republican governor of the state, not the president.
The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the “rightful” commander in chief cannot be dismissed.
Imagine competing commanders in chief — a newly reelected Biden giving orders, versus Trump (or another Trumpian figure) issuing orders as the head of a shadow government. Worse, imagine politicians at the state and federal levels illegally installing a losing candidate as president.
All service members take an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution. But in a contested election, with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.
In this context, with our military hobbled and divided, U.S. security would be crippled. Any one of our enemies could take advantage by launching an all-out assault on our assets or our allies.
The lack of military preparedness for the aftermath of the 2020 election was striking and worrying. Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, testified that he deliberately withheld military protection of the Capitol before Jan. 6. Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly scrambled to ensure the nation’s nuclear defense chains were secure from illegal orders. It is evident the whole of our military was caught off-guard.
With the country still as divided as ever, we must take steps to prepare for the worst.
First, everything must be done to prevent another insurrection. Not a single leader who inspired it has been held to account. Our elected officials and those who enforce the law — including the Justice Department, the House select committee and the whole of Congress — must show more urgency.
But the military cannot wait for elected officials to act. The Pentagon should immediately order a civics review for all members — uniformed and civilian — on the Constitution and electoral integrity. There must also be a review of the laws of war and how to identify and deal with illegal orders. And it must reinforce “unity of command” to make perfectly clear to every member of the Defense Department whom they answer to. No service member should say they didn’t understand whom to take orders from during a worst-case scenario.
In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.
Finally, the Defense Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military.
The military and lawmakers have been gifted hindsight to prevent another insurrection from happening in 2024 — but they will succeed only if they take decisive action now.
21. The March of the New American Leninists
Excerpts:
This being the United States of America, our revolutionary fervor is driven in some non-trivial part by cynical profit-seeking, with media figures as superficially different but fundamentally identical as the daft galaxy of Fox News and MSNBC pundits feverishly working to convince Americans that our society and our institutions are not in need of reform but are in fact so irredeemably corrupt that they must be overthrown. These arguments are made almost purely for commercial purposes — there isn’t a lot of money to be made from sensible conversations about incremental reform — but their influence extends well beyond the balance sheets of their corporate parents. I used to say, with unwarranted confidence, that the real world isn’t Twitter, and Twitter isn’t the real world. That turns out not to be true.
There is plenty of cynicism at work in the media business, but it would be wrong to think that figures such as Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow create revolutionary fervor on their own — they are only supplying a preexisting demand in the market. They do not create demand any more than Purdue Pharma or Pornhub do. The ultimate source of the revolutionary fervor is in the people themselves, in the “masses,” as the creaky old Marxists still call them.
Lenin would understand our situation. He might even be a little bit proud.
The March of the New American Leninists
The more loyalty to a political leader or movement supplants loyalty to the constitutional order, the closer we come to revolution.
S
teve Bannon, the recently indicted Trump sycophant and ex-Breitbart jackass, sometimes describes himself as a “Leninist.” I believe him. And he isn’t alone.
For Vladimir Lenin, a revolution required three preconditions: The masses had to be unwilling to accept the status quo, the ruling class had to be unable to enforce the status quo, and, as a result of the first two, there had to be an outbreak of political fervor and activity among the masses. Once these conditions were satisfied, Lenin would be ready to move on to the question of revolutionary instruments, which in his case were war, terror, and executions.
(It is worth keeping in mind that Bolsheviks wanted to outlaw capital punishment, and Lenin overruled them: “How can you make a revolution without executions?”)
Americans are a little sentimental about revolutions, because we had one of the very few good ones. But the revolutionary family tree gets pretty ugly pretty quickly: The American Revolution helps to inspire the French Revolution, with its purges and terror; the French Revolution provides a model for Lenin and his gang; the Russian Revolution informs the Iranian revolution. The line from the Boston Tea Party to the Iran hostage crisis is not a bold, straight one, but it can be seen, if you want to see it. Revolutions are dangerous, often in ways that are not obvious at the time and become understood only decades later.
Lenin, who wrote about the world in terms of capital-H History, was also a practical man. (Hence the terror and the executions.) And so he probably would have understood, as Steve Bannon and others of that ilk (from Bernie Sanders to Eric Zemmour) understand, that there are additional practical considerations.
One of those, which we can see emerging in the United States on both sides of the political aisle, involves a question of loyalty. Loyalty is very much on the minds of American political partisans, with each side denouncing the other as “traitors” and “seditionists” and “insurrectionists” and the like. If you are not used to the intellectual compartmentalization required of an American politician, it can be jarring to hear, e.g., Senator Sanders demanding “revolution” at 10 a.m. and denouncing “insurrection” at 10:15 a.m.
But the most relevant issue involving loyalty is this: We are in a pre-revolutionary situation because the regime — by which I mean not the Biden administration but the American constitutional order itself and the principal institutions associated with it — is being made to compete for the loyalty of Americans against individual politicians (Donald Trump), particular political organizations and movements (BLM), and less well-defined political tendencies (right-wing identity and left-wing identity). There has always been partisan fanaticism, and there have always been demagogues. When loyalty to a political leader or a political movement supplants loyalty to the regime, the nation grows dangerously close to revolution in proportion to the degree to which such tendencies are general and widespread.
When some significant share of citizens feel themselves more closely identified with a particular politician than with the constitutional order per se, then you have the conditions for a coup d’état and a caudillo; when some significant share of citizens feel themselves more closely identified with a party or a movement than with the constitutional order per se, then you have the conditions for a more broad-based revolution. The first gets you an Augusto Pinochet or a Francisco Franco, and the second gets you a Russian Revolution or a French Revolution — both of which eventually produced caudillos of their own, meaning that they ended up in much the same place.
As far as the events of January 6 go, the “stolen election” fiction was a moral-permission slip for acting on loyalties (and the social demands associated with such loyalties) that long preceded the 2020 election and will long outlast it. Some of these revolutionists invaded the Capitol, but the more important ones work there. And what they hope to do is to achieve what Lenin wanted: “unrestricted power based on force, not law.” The legal pretexts feverishly dreamt up by such ghoulish amoralists as Rudy Giuliani were exercises in publicity, not exercises in law. The lawyers are the marketing department of the revolution.
This being the United States of America, our revolutionary fervor is driven in some non-trivial part by cynical profit-seeking, with media figures as superficially different but fundamentally identical as the daft galaxy of Fox News and MSNBC pundits feverishly working to convince Americans that our society and our institutions are not in need of reform but are in fact so irredeemably corrupt that they must be overthrown. These arguments are made almost purely for commercial purposes — there isn’t a lot of money to be made from sensible conversations about incremental reform — but their influence extends well beyond the balance sheets of their corporate parents. I used to say, with unwarranted confidence, that the real world isn’t Twitter, and Twitter isn’t the real world. That turns out not to be true.
There is plenty of cynicism at work in the media business, but it would be wrong to think that figures such as Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow create revolutionary fervor on their own — they are only supplying a preexisting demand in the market. They do not create demand any more than Purdue Pharma or Pornhub do. The ultimate source of the revolutionary fervor is in the people themselves, in the “masses,” as the creaky old Marxists still call them.
Lenin would understand our situation. He might even be a little bit proud.
National Review,
22. Obituaries in Fayetteville, NC - Renay Mandel Corren
A life well lived and one hell of an obituary!
Obituaries in Fayetteville, NC | Fayetteville Observer
Renay Mandel Corren
Obituary
Renay Mandel Corren
El Paso, TX—A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday.
Of itself hardly news, or good news if you're the type that subscribes to the notion that anybody not named you dying in El Paso, Texas is good news. In which case have I got news for you: the bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has kicked it. This was not good news to Renay Mandel Corren's many surviving children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of whom she even knew and, in her own way, loved. There will be much mourning in the many glamorous locales she went bankrupt in: McKeesport, PA, Renay's birthplace and where she first fell in love with ham, and atheism; Fayetteville and Kill Devil Hills, NC, where Renay's dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried; and of course Miami, FL, where Renay's parents, uncles, aunts, and eternal hopes of all Miami Dolphins fans everywhere, are all buried pretty deep. Renay was preceded in death by Don Shula.
Because she was my mother, the death of zaftig good-time gal Renay Corren at the impossible old age of 84 is newsworthy to me, and I treat it with the same respect and reverence she had for, well, nothing. A more disrespectful, trash-reading, talking and watching woman in NC, FL or TX was not to be found. Hers was an itinerant, much-lived life, a Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal who bowled 'em in Japan, rolled 'em in North Carolina and was a singularly unique parent. Often frustrated by the stifling, conservative culture of the South, Renay turned her voracious mind to the home front, becoming a model stay at home parent, a supermom, really, just the perfect PTA lady, volunteer, amateur baker and-AHHAHAA HA! HA! HA! Just kidding, y'all! Renay - Rosie to her friends, and this was a broad who never met a stranger - worked double shifts with Doreen, ate a ton of carbs with Bernie, and could occasionally be stirred to stew some stuffed cabbage for the kids. She played cards like a shark, bowled and played cribbage like a pro, and laughed with the boys until the wee hours, long after the last pin dropped. At one point in the 1980's, Renay was the 11th or 12th-ranked woman in cribbage in America, and while that could be a lie, it sounds great in print. She also told us she came up with the name for Sunoco, and I choose to believe this, too. Yes, Renay lied a lot. But on the plus side, Renay didn't cook, she didn't clean, and she was lousy with money, too. Here's what Renay was great at: dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines. She said she read them for the articles, but filthy free speech was really Renay's thing. Hers was a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke and loud. We thought Renay could not be killed. God knows, people tried. A lot. Renay has been toying with death for a decades, but always beating it and running off in her silver Chevy Nova. Covid couldn't kill Renay. Neither could pneumonia twice, infections, blood clots, bad feet, breast cancer twice, two mastectomies, two recessions, multiple bankruptcies, marriage to a philandering Sergeant Major, divorce in the 70's, six kids, one cesarean, a few abortions from the Quietly Famous Abortionist of Spring Lake, NC or an affair with Larry King in the 60's. Renay was preceded in death by her ex-boyfriend, Larry King. Renay was also sadly preceded in death by her beloved daughter, Cathy Sue Corren Lester Trammel Webster, of Kill Devil Hills, NC, who herself was preceded in death by two marriages, a fudge shop and one eyeball lost in a near-fatal Pepsi bottle incident that will absolutely be explored in future obituaries. Losing her 1-eyed badass b**** of a daughter in 2007 devastated Renay, but it also made her quite homeless, since Cathy pretty much picked up the tab. A talented and gregarious grifter, Renay M. Corren eked out her final years of luxury (she literally retired at 62) under the care, compassion, checking accounts and, evidently, unlimited patience of her favorite son and daughter-in-law, Michael and Lourdes Corren, of world-famous cow sanctuary El Paso, TX. Renay is also survived by her son Jeffrey Corren and his endlessly tolerant wife Shirley, of Powell's Point, NC; Scott Corren, and what's left of his colon, of Hampton, VA; Marc and Laura Corren, the loveliest dirt farmers of Vernon, TX (seriously, where is that); and her favorite son, the gay one who writes catty obituaries in his spare time, Andy Corren, of - obviously - New York City. Plus two beloved granddogs, Mia and Hudson. Renay was particularly close to and grateful for the lavish attentions of her grandaughter Perla and her great-grandchildren Elijah and Leroy, as well as her constant cruise companions Sam Trammell of Greenville, NC, and Adam Corren of El Paso, TX. Renay took tremendous pride in making 1 gay son and 2 gay grandchildren, Sam Trammell and Adam Corren.
There will be a very disrespectful and totally non-denominational memorial on May 10, 2022, most likely at a bowling alley in Fayetteville, NC. The family requests absolutely zero privacy or propriety, none what so ever, and in fact encourages you to spend some government money today on a 1-armed bandit, at the blackjack table or on a cheap cruise to find our inheritance. She spent it all, folks. She left me nothing but these lousy memories. Which I, and my family of 5 brothers and my sister-in-laws, nephews, friends, nieces, neighbors, ex-boyfriends, Larry King's children, who I guess I might be one of, the total strangers who all, to a person, loved and will cherish her. Forever. Please think of the brightly-frocked, frivolous, funny and smart Jewish redhead who is about to grift you, tell you a filthy joke, and for Larry King's sake: LAUGH. Bye, Mommy. We loved you to bits.
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.
