Quotes of the Day:
"If you want peace, understand war - particularly the guerrilla and subversive forms of war."
- Liddel Hart
"It does not matter what's the color of your skin, what language do you speak, what religion you believe in. It is that we should all consider each other as human beings and we should respect each other and we should all fight for our rights, for the rights of children, for the rights of women and for the rights of every human being."
- Malala Yousafzai
"Persuasion is often more effectual than force."
- Aesop
1. Civilian Deaths Mounted as Secret Unit Pounded ISIS
2. Congress’s Message to Biden on Defense
3. Taiwan chipmakers hint at decoupling from the US
4. Japan’s new right flexes, snubs US, at Yasukuni shrine
5. Opinion | In the NBA, Freedom stands tall against China
6. Diplomatic Courier’s Best Books of 2021
7. Election denier who circulated Jan. 6 PowerPoint says he met with Meadows at White House
8. UAE halts construction of Chinese military facility in country after US pressure: Reports
9. Washington considers shift to ‘sole purpose’ use of nuclear arms
10. Refugee aid groups in Washington region overwhelmed by Afghan caseloads
11. Vaccine holdouts in U.S. military approach 40,000 even as omicron variant fuels call for boosters
12. U.S. universities keep ties to Chinese schools that support China’s military buildup, report says
13. Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans
14. Diplomacy Alone Can’t Save Democracy
15. What Special Operations Command's 'Biggest Lesson' from Afghanistan Means for Future Fights
16. Meet the Special Forces task force featured on the Army uniforms
17. What I told the students of Princeton by Abigail Shrier
1. Civilian Deaths Mounted as Secret Unit Pounded ISIS
One of the most difficult jobs in the military must be the public affairs officer for special mission units who has to respond to the press over these reports.
There are apparently four officers, active and former, who seem to be providing this information to the NY Times journalists.
The four officials worked in different parts of the war effort, but all interacted directly with Talon Anvil on hundreds of strikes and soon grew concerned with its way of operating. They reported what they were seeing to immediate superiors and the command overseeing the air war, but say they were ignored.
"Talon Anvil" will be the new code name we will be hearing about. I am sure many books will be written about it.
I am reminded of Yasotay, the Mongol Warlord who said, “When the hour of crisis comes, remember that 40 selected men can shake the world.”
Talon Anvil was small — at times fewer than 20 people operating from anonymous rooms cluttered with flat screens — but it played an outsize role in the 112,000 bombs and missiles launched against the Islamic State, in part because it embraced a loose interpretation of the military’s rules of engagement.
“They were ruthlessly efficient and good at their jobs,” said one former Air Force intelligence officer who worked on hundreds of classified Talon Anvil missions from 2016 to 2018. “But they also made a lot of bad strikes.”
The military billed the air war against the Islamic State as the most precise and humane in military history, and said strict rules and oversight by top leaders kept civilian deaths to a minimum despite a ferocious pace of bombing. In reality, four current and former military officials say, the majority of strikes were ordered not by top leaders but by relatively low-ranking U.S. Army Delta Force commandos in Talon Anvil.
...
The strike cell was run by a classified Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 that oversaw the ground offensive in Syria. The task force had multiple missions. Army Green Berets trained allied Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces. Small groups of Delta Force operators embedded with ground forces, and an assault team of Delta commandos were on call to launch ground raids on high-value targets, including the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Most of the firepower, though, was run by Talon Anvil. It worked out of bland office spaces, first in Erbil, Iraq, and then, as the war progressed, in Syria, at a shuttered cement plant in the north, and at a housing complex near the Iraqi border called Green Village, former task force members said.
Civilian Deaths Mounted as Secret Unit Pounded ISIS
Talon Anvil directed thousands of strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria, but former and current officials said its aggressive approach regularly killed civilians.Credit...Vadim Ghirda/Associated Press
An American strike cell alarmed its partners as it raced to defeat the enemy.
Talon Anvil directed thousands of strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria, but former and current officials said its aggressive approach regularly killed civilians.Credit...Vadim Ghirda/Associated Press
- Dec. 12, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ET
A single top secret American strike cell launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles against the Islamic State in Syria, but in the process of hammering a vicious enemy, the shadowy force sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians, according to multiple current and former military and intelligence officials.
The unit was called Talon Anvil, and it worked in three shifts around the clock between 2014 and 2019, pinpointing targets for the United States’ formidable air power to hit: convoys, car bombs, command centers and squads of enemy fighters.
But people who worked with the strike cell say in the rush to destroy enemies, it circumvented rules imposed to protect noncombatants, and alarmed its partners in the military and the C.I.A. by killing people who had no role in the conflict: farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings.
Talon Anvil was small — at times fewer than 20 people operating from anonymous rooms cluttered with flat screens — but it played an outsize role in the 112,000 bombs and missiles launched against the Islamic State, in part because it embraced a loose interpretation of the military’s rules of engagement.
“They were ruthlessly efficient and good at their jobs,” said one former Air Force intelligence officer who worked on hundreds of classified Talon Anvil missions from 2016 to 2018. “But they also made a lot of bad strikes.”
The military billed the air war against the Islamic State as the most precise and humane in military history, and said strict rules and oversight by top leaders kept civilian deaths to a minimum despite a ferocious pace of bombing. In reality, four current and former military officials say, the majority of strikes were ordered not by top leaders but by relatively low-ranking U.S. Army Delta Force commandos in Talon Anvil.
U.S. forces and members of the Syrian Democratic Forces patrol the Kurdish-held town of Darbasiyah in northeastern Syria in 2018.
The New York Times reported last month that a Special Operations bombing run in 2019 killed dozens of women and children, and that the aftermath was concealed from the public and top military leaders. In November, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered a high-level investigation into the strike, which was carried out by Talon Anvil.
But people who saw the task force operate firsthand say the 2019 strike was part of a pattern of reckless strikes that started years earlier.
When presented with The Times’ findings, several current and former senior Special Operations officers denied any widespread pattern of reckless airstrikes by the strike cell and disregard for limiting civilian casualties. Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesman for the military’s Central Command, which oversees operations in Syria, declined to comment.
As bad strikes mounted, the four military officials said, Talon Anvil’s partners sounded the alarm. Pilots over Syria at times refused to drop bombs because Talon Anvil wanted to hit questionable targets in densely populated areas. Senior C.I.A. officers complained to Special Operations leaders about the disturbing pattern of strikes. Air Force teams doing intelligence work argued with Talon Anvil over a secure phone known as the red line. And even within Talon Anvil, some members at times refused to participate in strikes targeting people who did not seem to be in the fight.
The four officials worked in different parts of the war effort, but all interacted directly with Talon Anvil on hundreds of strikes and soon grew concerned with its way of operating. They reported what they were seeing to immediate superiors and the command overseeing the air war, but say they were ignored.
The former Air Force intelligence officer, who worked almost daily on missions from 2016 to 2018, said he notified the main Air Force operations center in the region about civilian casualties several times, including after a March 2017 strike when Talon Anvil dropped a 500-pound bomb on a building where about 50 people were sheltering. But he said leaders seemed reluctant to scrutinize a strike cell that was driving the offensive on the battlefield.
Every year that the strike cell operated, the civilian casualty rate in Syria increased significantly, according to Larry Lewis, a former Pentagon and State Department adviser who was one of the authors of a 2018 Defense Department report on civilian harm. Mr. Lewis, who has viewed the Pentagon’s classified civilian casualty data for Syria, said the rate was 10 times that of similar operations he tracked in Afghanistan.
“It was much higher than I would have expected from a U.S. unit,” Mr. Lewis said. “The fact that it increased dramatically and steadily over a period of years shocked me.”
Mr. Lewis said commanders enabled the tactics by failing to emphasize the importance of reducing civilian casualties, and that Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, who commanded the offensive against the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017, was dismissive of widespread reports from news media and human rights organizations describing the mounting toll.
In a telephone interview, General Townsend, who now heads the military’s Africa Command, said outside organizations that tracked civilian harm claims often did not vet allegations rigorously enough. But he strongly denied that he didn’t take civilian casualties seriously. “There’s nothing further from the truth,” said General Townsend, who added that as commander he ordered monthly civilian casualty reports in Iraq and Syria be made public. He blamed any civilian casualties on “the misfortunes of war” and not because “we didn’t care.”
Smoke billows from Raqqa after a coalition airstrike in July 2017.
With few Americans on the ground, it was difficult to get reliable counts of civilian deaths, according to Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the head of the military’s Central Command at the time, and General Townsend’s boss.
“Our ability to get out and look after a strike was extraordinarily limited — it was an imperfect system,” General Votel said in a telephone interview. “But I believe we always took this seriously and tried to do our best.”
Tips, Intercepts and Strikes
Officially, Talon Anvil never existed. Nearly everything it did was highly classified. The strike cell’s actions in Syria were gleaned from descriptions of top secret reports and interviews with current and former military personnel who interacted with the group and who discussed it on the condition that they not be named.
The strike cell was run by a classified Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 that oversaw the ground offensive in Syria. The task force had multiple missions. Army Green Berets trained allied Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces. Small groups of Delta Force operators embedded with ground forces, and an assault team of Delta commandos were on call to launch ground raids on high-value targets, including the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Most of the firepower, though, was run by Talon Anvil. It worked out of bland office spaces, first in Erbil, Iraq, and then, as the war progressed, in Syria, at a shuttered cement plant in the north, and at a housing complex near the Iraqi border called Green Village, former task force members said.
The cell used tips from allied ground forces, secret electronic intercepts, drone cameras and other information to find enemy targets, then hit them with munitions from drones or called in strikes from other coalition aircraft. It also coordinated air support for allied Kurdish and Arab forces fighting on the ground.
Outwardly, the operators showed few signs that they were military, said a former task force member who worked with the strike cell during the height of the war in 2017. They used first names and no rank or uniforms, and many had bushy beards and went to work in shorts and footwear that included Crocs and Birkenstocks. But from their strike room, they controlled a fleet of Predator and Reaper drones that bristled with precision Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs.
The task force had a second strike cell that worked with the C.I.A. to hunt high-value Islamic State leaders. It used similar tools, but often tracked a target for days or weeks, and accounted for a fraction of the strikes.
Both cells were created in 2014 when the Islamic State had overrun large parts of Iraq and Syria. Within a few years, the self-declared caliphate was attacking allies in the Middle East and launching terrorist attacks in Europe. The United States was desperate for a force that could identify enemy targets, and put Delta Force in charge.
Early in the American-led offensive, which was known as Operation Inherent Resolve, the military struggled to function at “the speed of war,” as only high-ranking generals from outside Delta could approve strikes, according to a RAND Corporation report on the air war. Seventy-four percent of sorties returned without dropping any weapons, and the offensive began to stall.
Tactics changed late in 2016 when General Townsend took command and, in an attempt to keep pace with a rapidly expanding offensive, moved the authority to approve strikes down to the level of on-scene commanders.
Within Task Force 9, that authority was effectively pushed even lower, a senior official with extensive experience in Iraq and Syria said, to the senior enlisted Delta operator on shift in the strike room — usually a sergeant first class or master sergeant.
Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, center, lowered the level of authority to approve strikes to on scene commanders, increasing the number of strikes.Credit...Mosa'ab Elshamy/Associated Press
Under the new rules, the strike cell was still required to follow a process of intelligence gathering and risk mitigation to limit harm to civilians before launching a strike. That often meant flying drones over targets for hours to make sure the cell could positively identify enemies and determine whether civilians were in the area.
But the Delta operators were under enormous pressure to protect allied ground troops and move the offensive forward, the former task force member said, and felt hobbled by the safeguards. So in early 2017, they found a way to strike more quickly: self-defense.
Most of Operation Inherent Resolve’s restrictions applied only to offensive strikes. There were far fewer restrictions for defensive strikes that were meant to protect allied forces under imminent threat of harm. So Talon Anvil began claiming that nearly every strike was in self-defense, which enabled them to move quickly with little second-guessing or oversight, even if their targets were miles from any fighting, two former task force members said.
The classified rules of engagement warned that self-defense strikes should not be used to circumvent the more restrictive rules for offensive strikes, two officers with knowledge of the rules said. But for Talon Anvil, there was a tenuous logic to the tactic, one of the former task force members said. If defense rules allowed Talon Anvil to attack an enemy target on the front lines, then why not the same type of target 10 or even 100 miles away that might one day be on the front lines? Soon Talon Anvil was justifying nearly every strike as defensive.
“It’s more expedient to resort to self-defense,” said Mr. Lewis, the former Pentagon adviser. “It’s easier to get approved.”
But speeding up strikes meant less time to gather intelligence and sort enemy fighters from civilians, and the four former military personnel who worked with Talon Anvil said that too often the cell relied on flimsy intelligence from Kurdish and Arab ground forces or rushed to attack with little regard to who might be nearby.
One former task force member said the vast majority of Talon Anvil’s strikes killed only enemy fighters, but that the Delta operators in the strike cell were biased toward hitting and often decided something was an enemy target when there was scant supporting evidence. Part of the problem, he said, was that operators, who rotated through roughly every four months, were trained as elite commandos but had little experience running a strike cell. It addition, he said, the daily demands of overseeing strike after strike seemed to erode operators’ perspective and fray their humanity.
The former Air Force intelligence officer said he saw so many civilian deaths as a result of Talon Anvil’s tactics citing self-defense that he eventually grew jaded and accepted them as part of the job. Even still, some attacks stood out.
In one, he said, Talon Anvil followed three men, all with canvas bags, working in an olive grove near the city of Manbij in the fall of 2016. The men had no weapons, and were not near any fighting, but the strike cell insisted they must be enemy fighters and killed them with a missile.
Syrians flee their homes in the regional capital of Raqqa in July 2017.
In another, as civilians were trying to flee fighting in the city of Raqqa in June 2017, scores of people boarded makeshift ferries to cross the Euphrates River. He said the task force claimed the ferries were carrying enemy fighters, and he watched on high-definition video as it hit multiple boats, killing at least 30 civilians, whose bodies drifted away in the green water.
A senior military official with direct knowledge of the task force said that what counted as an “imminent threat” was extremely subjective and Talon Anvil’s senior Delta operators were given broad authority to launch defensive strikes. At times, the official acknowledged, that led to bad strikes, and those who showed poor judgment were removed. But the official emphasized these instances were rare.
Fighters, or Children?
As airstrikes escalated in 2017, a broad array of U.S. partners working with the strike cell grew troubled by its tactics.
The C.I.A. had officers embedded in Task Force 9 to supply intelligence on Islamic State leaders and coordinate strikes. The agency was pursuing high-value individuals, and often tracked them for days using multiple drones, waiting to strike when civilian deaths could be minimized.
The task force did not always like to wait, two former C.I.A. officers said. C.I.A. personnel were shocked when they repeatedly saw the group strike with little regard for civilians. Officers reported their concerns to the Department of Defense’s Inspector General, and the agency’s leadership discussed the issue with top officers at the Joint Special Operations Command, one former C.I.A. officer said.
The officer said he never saw evidence that these concerns were taken seriously.
A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.
Talon Anvil also clashed at times with the Air Force intelligence teams based in the United States that helped to analyze the torrent of footage from drones. The Delta operators would push analysts to say they saw evidence such as weapons that could legally justify a strike, even when there was none, the former Air Force intelligence officer said. If one analyst did not see what Delta wanted, Delta would ask for a different one.
Delta Force and analysts sometimes argued over whether figures in the sights of a drone were fighters or children, one of the former task force members said.
All of the footage from the strikes is stored by the military. In an apparent attempt to blunt criticism and undercut potential investigations, Talon Anvil started directing drone cameras away from targets shortly before a strike hit, preventing the collection of video evidence, the former Air Force intelligence officer and one of the former task force members said.
Another Air Force officer, who reviewed dozens of task force strikes where civilians were reportedly killed, said that drone crews were trained to keep cameras on targets so the military could assess damage. Yet he frequently saw cameras jerk away at key moments, as if hit by a wind gust. It was only after seeing the pattern over and over, he said, that he began to believe it was done on purpose.
A Hunt for Targets
One morning before dawn in early March 2017, Talon Anvil sent a Predator drone over a Syrian farming town called Karama to cripple enemy positions in the area in preparation for an offensive by allies a week later.
For the former Air Force intelligence officer, the mission stands out as an example of Talon Anvil’s flawed way of operating, and how military leaders seemed to look the other way.
At about 4 a.m., he said, the drone arrived over the town’s flat-roofed houses. His Air Force intelligence team was watching from a secure operations center in the United States. A Talon Anvil operator typed a message into the chat room the cell shared with intelligence analysts: All civilians have fled the area. Anyone left is an enemy fighter. Find lots of targets for us today because we want to go Winchester.
Going Winchester meant expending all of the drone’s missiles and 500-pound bombs.
Members of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces patrol in the town of Karama in 2017.
As the drone circled, the town appeared to be asleep, the former officer said. Even with infrared sensors, the team did not see movement. Talon Anvil focused in on a building and typed in the chat that a tip from ground forces indicated that the building was an enemy training center. Sensors suggested an enemy cellphone or radio might be in the neighborhood but was unable to pinpoint it to a single block, let alone a single building.
Talon Anvil did not wait for confirmation, and ordered a self-defense strike, the former officer said. The Predator dropped a 500-pound bomb through the roof.
As the smoke cleared, the former officer said, his team stared at their screens in dismay. The infrared cameras showed women and children staggering out of the partly collapsed building, some missing limbs, some dragging the dead.
The intelligence analysts began taking screen shots and tallying the casualties. They sent an initial battle damage assessment to Talon Anvil: 23 dead or severely wounded, 30 lightly wounded, very likely civilians. Talon Anvil paused only long enough to acknowledge the message, the former officer said, then pressed on to the next target.
The former Air Force officer said he immediately reported the civilian casualties to Operation Inherent Resolve’s operations center, then called the center’s liaison officer on the red line. He said he never heard back and saw no evidence that any action was ever taken.
Operation Inherent Resolve made a commitment to investigate and report every case of civilian casualties publicly, but nothing in its reports matches the incident. The true toll of the strike in Karama remains uncertain.
Satellite images show significant damage from airstrikes in the Syrian town of Karama.Credit...Satellite images © 2021 Maxar Technologies.
During a five-day window in early March, Operation Inherent Resolve acknowledged that it launched 47 strikes in the region. Satellite images from the time show extensive damage to at least a dozen buildings, including the building that the former officer said he saw bombed. Local media reported that airstrikes in Karama on March 8 and 9 killed between seven and 14 people and wounded 18.
For two years after the strikes, Operation Inherent Resolve said it could not confirm any civilian casualties in the town. Then, in 2019, it acknowledged that one man had been wounded when the coalition struck an enemy fighting position. It gave coordinates a block from the building the former Air Force intelligence officer said he saw destroyed.
In response to questions from The Times this month, a Special Operations official acknowledged its strike cell had hit targets in the town on March 8 and killed 16 fighters, but denied that any civilians had died.
No outside group has ever investigated the secret strike, and it is unclear what steps the military took to determine what happened. The former officer said no military investigators ever contacted him.
The evidence from the strike — the chat room records, bombing coordinates and video — is stored on government servers, the former officer said. But because of the secrecy surrounding Talon Anvil, all of it is classified.
Azmat Khan contributed reporting. Additional production by Christoph Koettl and Drew Jordan.
2. Congress’s Message to Biden on Defense
Please note my bias. I think it is interesting that most of these analyses and OpEds talk about China, Russia, and Iran and always seem to leave out north Korea.
Conclusion:
Yet the 2022 authorization at least reflects a growing bipartisan acknowledgment of geopolitical reality. China and Russia are threatening shooting wars against their U.S.-aligned neighbors, and Iran is accelerating its bid for nuclear weapons, as international institutions flail and weaken.
For the President to propose shrinking American defense in those circumstances was astonishing. This week’s House vote suggests the American public is not prepared to abandon its global interests, especially in Asia, as easily as the White House thought and the world’s rogues hoped.
Congress’s Message to Biden on Defense
The House overrules the Pentagon’s after-inflation budget cut.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
A U.S. Navy sailor runs across the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Philippine Sea, May 22, 2020.
Photo: Mcs Erik Melgar/U.S. Navy/Zuma Press
The House passed the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) this week, 363-70, and the press is focusing on cultural issues like tweaks to the military’s justice system and the defeated proposal to draft women. But the bigger story is that Congress delivered a bipartisan rebuke to the utterly unrealistic defense budget the Biden Administration released earlier this year.
President Biden in May proposed $715 billion for the Department of Defense in 2022. That was a 1.6% increase from 2021, an inflation-adjusted cut to America’s national security in a world of growing threats. The $740 billion NDAA passed by the House and likely headed to the President’s desk authorizes a 5.2% increase.
The NDAA followed the White House proposal on military pay, authorizing a 2.7% increase for soldiers, sailors, airmen and other Pentagon employees. That means much of Congress’s $25 billion plus-up goes to more and better weaponry, especially for the Navy.
The House bill authorizes 13 new ships, up from the Biden budget’s request for eight. That includes three destroyers, compared to one sought by the Pentagon. The bill also invests $330 million in U.S. submarine-building capacity in the hopes of accelerating production to three attack subs per year.
America’s military advantage is declining, especially in East Asia, and House lawmakers earmarked $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. That’s $2 billion more than Mr. Biden sought. The Pentagon should use the funds to put hardware in the Pacific such as long-range missiles that can alter China’s calculus now, rather than investing in weapons systems that may not arrive for decades.
Full funding for these programs still depends on a separate appropriations bill. And the increase is a pittance compared to this Congress’s multi-trillion domestic spending tear. To maintain its military edge against great-power rivals, the Pentagon likely needs 3% to 5% annual above-inflation increases.
Yet the 2022 authorization at least reflects a growing bipartisan acknowledgment of geopolitical reality. China and Russia are threatening shooting wars against their U.S.-aligned neighbors, and Iran is accelerating its bid for nuclear weapons, as international institutions flail and weaken.
For the President to propose shrinking American defense in those circumstances was astonishing. This week’s House vote suggests the American public is not prepared to abandon its global interests, especially in Asia, as easily as the White House thought and the world’s rogues hoped.
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WSJ · by The Editorial Board
3. Taiwan chipmakers hint at decoupling from the US
Excerpts:
Taiwanese companies are leading China’s state-sponsored drive to build domestic semiconductor manufacturing. In November, Ye Tianchun, chairman of the integrated circuit (IC) division of China’s Semiconductor Industry Association told a conference: “A noteworthy phenomenon is that the proportion of domestic-funded enterprises’ revenue has dropped significantly from 2016 to 2020, from 44.0% to 27.7%, while the proportion of foreign-funded enterprises has risen from 49.1% to 61.3%,” led by Taiwanese chip fabricators.
“This means that the industry as a whole is growing and the revenue of domestic-funded enterprises is also growing, but the growth rate is much lower than that of foreign-funded enterprises and Taiwan-funded enterprises,” Ye added. His speech was reported in the Chinese website “Observer” (guancha.cn).
Taiwan’s chip producers want to maintain their leadership in China’s domestic chip fabrication and will build their own chip-making equipment to prevent US sanctions from slowing their investments on the mainland.
The two top providers of chip-making equipment, Applied Materials and LAM, both are American. Tokyo Electron, Japan’s largest equipment maker, increased its China sales from 50 billion yen ($441 million) in 2015 to 400 billion yen this year.
Taiwan chipmakers hint at decoupling from the US
World’s top chip fabricator wants own chip-making equipment to end dependence on US and better help China’s state-led production
NEW YORK – Taiwan’s chip fabricators signed an agreement on December 3 to create their own semiconductor equipment industry, opening an “option to decouple from the West,” in the view of a prominent US research firm.
The Taiwanese initiative responds to Washington’s extraterritorial sanctions on buyers of US fabricating equipment, imposed by then-president Donald Trump in May 2020. The US asserts the right to block sales of chips produced with US machines or intellectual property.
The US sanctions shut off Chinese tech giant Huawei’s access to high-end chips of 7 nanometers and below, crippling what previously was the world’s top handset producer. Unable to make 5G phones, Huawei lost market share to Chinese handset producer Xiaomi and sold its Honor smartphone business.
The US sanctions, though, had little impact on Huawei’s telecommunications equipment business including equipment for 5G infrastructure, which uses older chips that are easier to source.
Taiwan will become “an advanced semiconductor production center,“ said Taiwanese Vice-Premier Shen Jong-chin, adding that Taiwan would invite chip equipment makers to move facilities to the island. The Taipei government plans to build one or two additional science parks in addition to the three parks now in service to accommodate the equipment manufacturers.
“We have a world-leading semiconductor industry in Taiwan, but 90% of our semiconductor manufacturing equipment is imported,” said Habor Hsu, chairman of the Taiwan Machine Tool and Accessory Builders Association, the Taipei Times reported.
He added, “In the wake of Covid-19 and the US-China trade dispute, international businesses will change where and how they make their products.” Four Taiwanese trade groups and three nonprofit organizations representing the whole of Taiwan’s high-tech industry signed the deal.
Taiwan’s TSMC is the world’s leading semiconductor producer. Image: Facebook
Taiwan’s chipmakers, who have massive commitments on the Chinese mainland, fear that US sanctions may stop them from using American equipment to make semiconductors for the US$300 billion Chinese chip market, the world’s largest.
On December 9, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Defense Department wants to stop China’s largest chipmaker, SMIC, from purchasing American machines.
Industry analyst Dan Hutchison of the semiconductor research group VSLI wrote on December 8 that a home-grown chip equipment industry “would make it possible for Taiwan to decouple from the West. Worse, it points to a post-globalization world heading to a dark age of over-supply, fractured R&D resources and low innovation.”
Hutchison called the Taiwanese initiative a “clear post-globalization defensive move to counter the current US administration’s action to shut down China and China’s response to develop its own equipment industry.”
Taiwanese companies are leading China’s state-sponsored drive to build domestic semiconductor manufacturing. In November, Ye Tianchun, chairman of the integrated circuit (IC) division of China’s Semiconductor Industry Association told a conference: “A noteworthy phenomenon is that the proportion of domestic-funded enterprises’ revenue has dropped significantly from 2016 to 2020, from 44.0% to 27.7%, while the proportion of foreign-funded enterprises has risen from 49.1% to 61.3%,” led by Taiwanese chip fabricators.
“This means that the industry as a whole is growing and the revenue of domestic-funded enterprises is also growing, but the growth rate is much lower than that of foreign-funded enterprises and Taiwan-funded enterprises,” Ye added. His speech was reported in the Chinese website “Observer” (guancha.cn).
Taiwan’s chip producers want to maintain their leadership in China’s domestic chip fabrication and will build their own chip-making equipment to prevent US sanctions from slowing their investments on the mainland.
The two top providers of chip-making equipment, Applied Materials and LAM, both are American. Tokyo Electron, Japan’s largest equipment maker, increased its China sales from 50 billion yen ($441 million) in 2015 to 400 billion yen this year.
America’s chip industry opposed the sanctions, fearing that foreign chip fabricators would source equipment elsewhere. Trump initially vetoed the sanctions on chip equipment in December 2019 after the US Defense Department argued that it would cut revenues for American equipment makers and reduce their R&D funding.
On February 18, 2020, Trump tweeted: “The United States cannot, & will not, become such a difficult place to deal with in terms of foreign countries buying our product, including for the always used National Security excuse, that our companies will be forced to leave in order to remain competitive.”
But Trump changed his mind after the Covid-19 pandemic and chose what administration staffers called the “nuclear option” of banning sales to Huawei of foreign-made chips that used American equipment or intellectual property (see Trump bets the farm on Huawei equipment ban, May 22, 2020).
The US Chamber of Commerce warned last year, “For the US semiconductor industry, forgoing the China market would mean lower economies of scale and R&D spending—and a less central role in the full web of global technology supply chains. Decoupling would prompt some foreign firms to ‘de-Americanize’ their semiconductor activities, putting to the test whether that is possible and further motivating China to seek self-sufficiency. Lost access to Chinese customers would cause the US industry $54 billion to $124 billion in lost output, risking more than 100,000 jobs, $12 billion in R&D spending, and $13 billion in capital spending.”
China responded with a crash effort to build its own chip fabrication, concentrating on the “workhorse” sector of 14 nanometers and above. The 3-nanometer to 7-nanometer chips that power 5G smartphones require extreme ultraviolet lithography, with equipment produced only by Holland’s ASML.
Washington blocked access to this equipment. Nonetheless, China is now the world’s biggest buyer of semiconductor fabricating equipment, with nearly $16 billion in billings during the second and third quarters of 2021. Taiwan purchased about $12 billion in chip-making equipment during the same period. Some portion of that was transshipped to Taiwanese facilities on the mainland.
“China has narrowed its gap in semiconductor production and design to just one to two generations behind lead players,” Professor Graham Allison and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote In a December 2021 report by Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
“Over the next decade, China will become the world’s largest semiconductor producer in mature technology nodes, while ASML CEO Peter Wennink estimates that ‘in 15 years’ time they’ll be able to do it all by themselves [and achieve technological sovereignty in semiconductors],’” they wrote.
The US share of world semiconductor manufacturing has shrunk from an absolute monopoly in the 1960s to just 12% today, and only in mature nodes. President Joe Biden proposed and the US Senate passed a $52 billion subsidy for US semiconductor manufacturing.
But as Alan Patterson observed in a December 7 opinion piece for EE Times, a US electronics industry magazine published in the US, companies like Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Google who have lobbied for these subsidies spend money to buy back their stock rather than invest in chip-making.
America’s top chip-maker Intel “spent $50 billion on capital expenditures and $53 billion on R&D during the past five years,” Patterson observes. But Intel “also lavished shareholders with $35 billion in stock buybacks and $22 billion in cash dividends, which altogether used up 100% of Intel’s net income.”
4. Japan’s new right flexes, snubs US, at Yasukuni shrine
Excerpts:
Regardless of the lack so far of constitutional revision, Japan is beefing up its self-defense forces with expeditionary assets, including marines and aircraft carriers – assets it has not held since 1945. Having given up on an Aegis-ashore missile defense system, Tokyo is mulling a first-strike capability against North Korea.
And this week, as Tokyo invited media to watch military drills in Hokkaido, Prime Minister Kishida addressed the Diet on the issue of raising the national defense budget. That followed the passage last month of a record supplementary defense budget.
In October, Kishida raised the possibility of doubling defense spending, customarily kept within 1% of GDP, to the NATO standard of 2%. With Japan the world’s third-largest economy and already a global Top-10 defense spender, that would be huge sum.
Amid these developments, Japanese nationalism and Tokyo’s increased defense spending “are being coalesced by China and Korea,” Satoh said. “If they keep doing this, they will make it happen, as they are inciting this unnecessary level of Japanese drive.”
Japan’s new right flexes, snubs US, at Yasukuni shrine
A coalition of conservatives is putting Japanese rearmament and constitutional revision back on the agenda
TOKYO/SEOUL Asia’s history wars are heating up again after 99 Japanese lawmakers visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine on December 7 the 80th anniversary of the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor as well as American, British and Dutch forces across the Pacific, an assault that massively expanded World War II.
The visitors included not only lawmakers from the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), but also two right-wing parties – the Japan Innovation Party and Japan’s National Democratic Party – that are newly empowered after the election for the Lower House of the Diet in November.
The mass visit – Asia Times has been unable to discover a larger visit to the shrine by politicians – makes clear how closely these two “opposition” parties are aligned with the LDP. That alignment goes far beyond an attachment to a revisionist, “Lost Cause” narrative about Japan’s Pacific War.
As Asia Times previously reported, the two parties are also bullish on beefing up Japan’s armed forces and revising Japan’s pacifist constitution. This gives the ruling party added impetus in these areas, both of which are contentious among their neighbors – who, predictably, complained about the visit.
The rising nationalism may well be homegrown. But there are also external factors in play. The expanded strength of conservatives in the Diet indicates that increasing numbers of ordinary Japanese – cautious of China’s increasing assertiveness, fearful of North Korean missiles and irked by South Korea’s continued stridency about Japan’s historical misdeeds – support these trends.
All this suggests that deeper tensions are likely in the near future between Tokyo, on the one hand, and Beijing and Seoul on the other. These tensions could become explosive: Northeast Asia is engaged in an under-reported arms race, with all players adding such weapons as missiles, stealth fighters and aircraft carriers.
Those tensions are likely to further bog down Washington’s efforts to get Seoul and Tokyo to operate together against Beijing in areas like the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Indeed, unconfirmed Korean media reports say Tokyo is preparing economic retaliation against Seoul.
Moreover, the apparent snub aimed at the US suggests that Japanese nationalists are not as closely aligned with Washington – Tokyo’s wartime nemesis but post-war ally – as the latter might hope. This explains the gleeful jeering in Chinese media and social media over the date of the visit.
Japanese Special Defense Forces in a file photo. Image: AFP / EPA
Pearl Harbor day at Yasukuni Shrine
Yasukuni Shrine is seen by some simply as a Shinto site memorializing Japan’s millions of war dead – who include not just soldiers and sailors but also civilians killed in fire and atomic bombings.
But others point to the Class-A war criminals who are also enshrined among them, and the shrine’s museum, which promotes an imperialistic view of Japanese war-making.
The right-wing organization that organized the visit, “Diet Members’ Group Who Say Let’s Visit Yasukuni Shrine Together” is chaired by former deputy speaker of the House of Councilors, Hidehisa Otsuji.
It is the first time the parliamentary group has visited the shrine since the autumn festival in October 2019. The group usually visits the shrine in spring and autumn, and on August 15, the anniversary of the end of the Pacific War.
However, for the last two years, the group decided not to visit due to Covid-19. The purpose of this visit was ostensibly, “to ask the spirits of the war dead for protection from coronavirus.”
The visit sparked complaints from China, which was invaded by Japan in 1937, and from Korea, which had been colonized by Japan from 1910 to 1945.
Referring to the Yasukuni visit, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said, “Rather than learning historical lessons, they only seek to revive the specter of militarism. The Japanese side should adopt a right attitude, deeply reflect upon the Japanese militarism’s fascist atrocities and crimes against humanity and win trust from people around the world with concrete actions.”
South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson Choi Young-sam expressed “deep concern and regret” over the facilities that “glorify” Japan’s colonial past and invasions. Earlier, on October 17, the ministry made similar statements after Prime Minister Fumio Kishida sent an offering to the shrine.
What was surprising about the visit was not just the size of the lawmakers’ delegation, and its multi-party makeup, but also the date: December 7. The date is the 80th anniversary of the Japanese naval air strike on Pearl Harbor naval base that bought the United States into World War II.
While that attack was only one element in a superbly coordinated, mass Japanese offensive that near-simultaneously also hit British forces in then-Malaya, Dutch forces in the then-East Indies, and US forces in the Philippines, it is Pearl Harbor that has become enshrined in public memory.
US ships burn amid the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Due to the time difference across such vast geographies, the attack on Pearl Harbor actually took place on December 8, Japan-time, but in the US it was December 7. The latter date has become enshrined in most histories.
The big question is whether the timing was a deliberate snub to the US, orchestrated by the growing radical revisionist right-wing elements in the Diet – or just (insensitive) business as usual.
Though the Barack Obama administration was critical of Japanese prime ministerial visits to the site, Washington has this time remained silent. There was no response on the US State Department’s website, nor did the US Embassy in Japan – called by Asia Times – offer any comment.
Chinese media and social media had no such restraint. Outspoken state-owned media Global Times said the visit “spits on the US victory” in World War II.
Da Zhigang, director and research fellow of the Institute of Northeast Asian Studies at the Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, told the Chinese newspaper that it was a “challenge” to the US.
Chinese social media users piled on, tagging the account of the US Embassy in China, asking, “You seen this? Global Times reported.
“Oh no, now the one who tags along stands up and slaps the US in the face?” wrote another Chinese netizen. “What are you gonna do big boss?”
Resurgent right wing
The LDP is a broad conservative church, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is widely considered a more middle-of-the-road figure than his two predecessors at the premiership, Yoshihide Suga and Shinzo Abe.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida faces pressure from the right. Photo: AFP / Yomiuri / Ryohei Moriya
However, there are doubtless pressures pushing him further toward the right – pressures manifest on December 7.
Post-visit, Otsuji breezily told a press conference, “I am glad that I was able to visit the shrine for the first time in a long time.” But he also referred to Kishida, who has not been to Yasukuni since he took the national helm.
“I know he has a desire to visit the shrine,” Otsuji said. “I hope he will visit the shrine at the earliest opportunity.”
If he does, that will be a turnaround by a premier.
After the opprobrium that Abe caused by visiting the shrine during his first time in office, in his second term, starting in 2013, he did not visit. That practice was followed by Suga. However, Abe made his personal feelings clear to all, when he visited the shrine after resigning the premiership.
Over the last 20 years, a range of Japanese politicians and opinion leaders have steadily walked back early admissions of guilt and responsibility for World War II.
In July 2006, in a session of the Diet, Abe implied that the Class A War Criminals at Yasukuni weren’t really criminals at all and that a visit to Yasukuni was fine. In 2016, Suga made clear just before Abe’s visit to Pearl Harbor that the aim was “to pay respects to the war dead, not to offer an apology.”
Central in this attitude is the nationwide conservative lobby group Nippon Kagi (“Japan Conference”), which brings together influential members of society, such as media, business and politics. Otsuji is not just a member of the group; he has served on its board.
Among the aims of the group is gutting Article 9 of the constitution, which prohibits Japan from waging war, and allowing Japan to build a military capable of, and free to conduct, offensive operations.
While many in the United States would also like to see a more capable and less restrained Japanese military, they might be surprised to learn the animosity some members of Nippon Kaigi have toward the US-authored constitution, as well as its promotion of conservative, traditionalist gender and family values.
Since 2006, when Abe first became prime minister, “throwing off the shackles of the US,” has long been a goal of hard-right factions in the LDP. In 2012, the LDP created their own draft of a constitution to replace the current post-war version, which the majority of Japanese still holds sacrosanct.
Nippon Kaigi also wants an educational system that will promote a distinctly Japanese identity. That aim has raised accusations of blatant revisionism regarding historical touchpoints including the Nanjing Massacre and “comfort women.”
For such conservatives, Pearl Harbor was not a sneak attack but a defensive action necessitated by the US and Europe denying Japan strategic resources. And at a time when much of Asia was colonized by Western imperialists, Tokyo painted its strike into Southeast Asia as a war of liberation.
Seen through a historical prism, there is no question that Japanese actions did, indeed, hasten the end of Western imperialism in Southeast Asia and India. However, this narrative overlooks Japanese prior colonization of Korea, and its awesomely destructive war in China.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe remains a central figure in Japanese right wing and nationalistic circles. Photo: AFP / Franck Robichon
Constitution in the cross hairs
Constitutional revision is not simply about defense. The LDP’s proposed new constitution, which includes an emergency powers act, would enable the prime minister to suspend civil rights and make laws during a state of emergency.
Legal scholar Lawrence Repeta wrote in his 2013 essay, “Japan’s Democracy at Risk – The LDP’s Ten Most Dangerous Proposals for Constitutional Change” that it would “reject the universality of human rights” and possibly end Japan’s post-war liberal democracy.
From 2009, Abe, who remains an LDP kingmaker as he heads the largest faction of the LDP, was head of an extremist think tank and lobby group, Sosei Nippon (“Create Japan”), comprised of LDP lawmakers and other conservatives. There is considerable overlap between Nihon Sosei and Diet Members’ “Group Who Say Let’s Visit Yasukuni Shrine Together.”
Former minister of justice Nagase Jinenm at a grand convention on constitutional revision, held by Sosei Nippon in 2012, declared, “The people’s sovereignty, basic human rights and pacifism ― these three things date to the postwar regime imposed by MacArthur on Japan, therefore we have to get rid of them to make the constitution our own.”
At the same meeting, Tomomi Inada, a former minister of defense, proclaimed, “To protect the country, the people must shed their blood. Only Japan, which has dedicated itself to the imperial family for 2,600 years, is qualified to become a moral superpower.”
These kinds of comments, and the visit to Yasukuni, raise the eyebrows of scholars.
“One hopes that they went there to pray for the three million Japanese and some 15 million Asians sacrificed on the altar of ultra-nationalism in a reckless war initiated in 1931 by Japan’s ruling militarist and civilian leaders – not genuflecting at ground zero of the revisionist exculpatory and vindicating narrative of Japan’s wartime aggression,” said Jeff Kingston, an author and professor of Japanese studies.
Another scholar suggested that the visit was not out of context with those visits to war graves by Western politicians, whose forces have also fought colonial and expeditionary wars.
“They are signaling to conservative constituencies their respect for what in other countries would be regarded as a War Memorial site,” said Shaun O’Dwyer, an associate professor in the Faculty of Languages and Cultures at Kyushu University. “That does not mean they are genuflecting to any State Shinto ideology.”
But, he added, “It may be that a higher number of such conservative politicians embrace a ‘Lost Cause’ ideology of Japan’s war of 1937-45.”
Koichi Nakano, an expert on Japanese politics at Sophia University, was uncertain about the motive and date of the visit. It was hard to tell if it was a deliberate snub to the US, he said, noting that the Diet session had just opened the day before, meaning all parliamentarians were in Tokyo.
“I would say that there are not enough reasons to assume that it was a deliberate snub,” he continued. “They would easily do something like that against the Chinese or the Koreans, but they generally avoid antagonizing the Americans.”
As an example, he noted that the Yasukuni Museum’s display about Pearl Harbor was modified due to complaints from the US. But he also suggested that the December 7 visit was making up for the lack of a visit during the customary autumn festival that was made impossible due to Covid-19.
The latter point is germane. While there are high-profile visits every August 15, Yasukuni authorities prefer visits during the spring and autumn festivals, as they are not related to a single conflict. Yasukuni is a shrine for all Japanese war dead – not just those from the Pacific War.
The controversial Yasukuni Shrine – where war criminals are enshrined, but which conservative politicians feel compelled to visit – is an emotive touchstone for both the Japanese right and the country’s neighbors. Photo: Tom Coyner
Apology fatigue
Another scholar noted that even within Japan, Yasukuni polarizes opinion but external criticisms are driving a nationalist backlash.
“Yasukuni is divisive in Japan but there is a legitimate view that regardless of whether or not it is wholly representative, there is this question of, ‘Why can’t we go?’ – it should be the national leader’s choice to visit,” said Haruko Satoh, who teaches Japan’s relations with Asia at the Osaka School of International Public Policy.
Satoh is critical of Abe and points out that Kishida’s cabinet is not hard right with members from across a broad political spectrum. But she frets that Beijing and Seoul are – ironically – empowering Japanese nationalists.
“People like Abe and elements of the right-wing are more to do with restoring the imperial state and all that nationalism,” she said. “But there is also a reaction to Chinese and Koreans harping on these issues. There is apology fatigue.”
Korean vernacular media KBS reported this week that the LDP had chaired a committee to respond economically to South Korea’s actions, which include seizing the assets of Japanese firms to compensate those forced to labor during World War II. Asia Times has been unable to confirm this report.
Japan’s position is that hundreds of millions of dollars were paid in compensation to settle this and other issues in 1965 and that the Korean courts’ actions breach that agreement.
But beyond Korean-Japan economic squabbles, and beyond the domestic actions and aspirations of Japan’s hard right, real, region-relevant, political power dynamics are in play.
High-profile politicians have opened a national debate on what Japan’s stance should be toward the defense of Taiwan, which is fast becoming a regional flashpoint.
Regardless of the lack so far of constitutional revision, Japan is beefing up its self-defense forces with expeditionary assets, including marines and aircraft carriers – assets it has not held since 1945. Having given up on an Aegis-ashore missile defense system, Tokyo is mulling a first-strike capability against North Korea.
And this week, as Tokyo invited media to watch military drills in Hokkaido, Prime Minister Kishida addressed the Diet on the issue of raising the national defense budget. That followed the passage last month of a record supplementary defense budget.
In October, Kishida raised the possibility of doubling defense spending, customarily kept within 1% of GDP, to the NATO standard of 2%. With Japan the world’s third-largest economy and already a global Top-10 defense spender, that would be huge sum.
Amid these developments, Japanese nationalism and Tokyo’s increased defense spending “are being coalesced by China and Korea,” Satoh said. “If they keep doing this, they will make it happen, as they are inciting this unnecessary level of Japanese drive.”
5. Opinion | In the NBA, Freedom stands tall against China
Another example of how often immigrants are more patriotic and possess more character than those of us who were blessed to be born here and take our freedoms for granted.
Excerpts:
He could lose his career as a consequence — perhaps as soon as next week, when the Celtics will be able to trade or waive him. But regardless of what happens, Freedom has no intention of going silent.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to be in the league, but I’m going to expose these horrible people as much as I can,” he told me in an interview before his Tuesday game against the Los Angeles Lakers and their star, LeBron James. Freedom hasn’t only been calling out the dictators who rule places such as Turkey and China, but also the actors and athletes in the United States who abet them.
...
Some progressives have taken issue with Freedom’s willingness to speak on right-wing television and radio programs, where the hosts inevitably try to rope him into their unrelated partisan agendas. His aggressive and unpolished style leaves him open to attack.
But Freedom is forcing all of us to decide whether we will be silent while the Chinese government perpetrates a genocide against Uyghur Muslims on our watch. He has made his choice. What will the rest of us do?
Opinion | In the NBA, Freedom stands tall against China
The Washington Post · by Josh RoginColumnist December 9, 2021 at 6:14 p.m. EST · December 9, 2021
“We must always take sides,” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”
For many celebrities and athletes, openly criticizing China’s genocide and mass atrocities comes with huge costs and risks. That’s why corporations and their hired stars bend over backward to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the Chinese Communist Party. But in the National Basketball Association, Boston Celtics player Enes Kanter Freedom is answering Wiesel’s call and trying to force the rest of us to choose between silence and speaking up.
He could lose his career as a consequence — perhaps as soon as next week, when the Celtics will be able to trade or waive him. But regardless of what happens, Freedom has no intention of going silent.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to be in the league, but I’m going to expose these horrible people as much as I can,” he told me in an interview before his Tuesday game against the Los Angeles Lakers and their star, LeBron James. Freedom hasn’t only been calling out the dictators who rule places such as Turkey and China, but also the actors and athletes in the United States who abet them.
Freedom, who changed his last name after becoming an American citizen in November, has been on a fierce tear over the past two months, publicly attacking Chinese President Xi Jinping, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, actor John Cena, Nike and any other corporation or celebrity self-censoring on China’s atrocities. He knows he may never get another contract to play in the NBA, but he told me he doesn’t care.
“A lot of people are scared to say something, but someone had to do it, and sometimes you have to sacrifice to do it,” Freedom said. “And I hope more people will follow, now that they’ve seen it done.”
In fact, Freedom is not alone. Sacrificing millions of dollars in revenue, the Women’s Tennis Association pulled its events from China to protest Chinese government mistreatment of tennis star Peng Shuai. The voices of U.S. stars Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka surely mattered. But the International Olympic Committee actually helped Chinese authorities produce propaganda for Peng’s apparently staged reappearance.
In the NBA, Freedom said he has been pressured by officials and the NBA Players Association ever since he began protesting against China’s atrocities earlier this year. On Oct. 20, he wore shoes with the slogan “Free Tibet.” Two NBA officials begged him to take them off, he told me. Freedom refused. Chinese authorities responded by banning all Celtics games in China.
For his Oct. 22 game, Freedom upped the ante, wearing shoes bearing a flag used by Uyghurs who oppose Chinese rule and calling for the Chinese Communist Party to stop the genocide, torture, rape and slave labor ongoing in Xinjiang. At his Oct. 24 game, his shoes bore the words “Free China” and an image of Winnie the Pooh, often used as a mocking synonym for Xi.
NBA officials, including Commissioner Adam Silver, have told Freedom he is not breaking any rules by wearing shoes protesting China, he said. But the league’s silence stands in stark contrast to the support the NBA offered Freedom when he began speaking out against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government imprisoned his father, a genetics professor, for several years. Turkish authorities call Freedom a terrorist supporter for openly following exiled religious leader Fethullah Gulen. The league was vocal in support of him then, Freedom said, but now says nothing.
In November, Freedom called out James and his sponsor Nike, accusing “King” James of placing “money over morals” by ignoring forced labor in China. Freedom's shoes mocked James for claiming in 2019 that then-Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey “wasn’t educated” about the situation in Hong Kong when Morey tweeted in support of pro-democracy protests there.
In response, James has accused Freedom of trying to steal his “energy.” James can’t seem to fathom that Freedom might actually be standing up for what he believes in for the benefit of others. Freedom called James’s reaction “disgusting.”
“He has no shame,” Freedom said. “I can’t believe that he has the biggest influence in the NBA and maybe all of sports, and he’s just like, ‘I’m not going to say anything about this.’ It’s terrible.”
Some progressives have taken issue with Freedom’s willingness to speak on right-wing television and radio programs, where the hosts inevitably try to rope him into their unrelated partisan agendas. His aggressive and unpolished style leaves him open to attack.
But Freedom is forcing all of us to decide whether we will be silent while the Chinese government perpetrates a genocide against Uyghur Muslims on our watch. He has made his choice. What will the rest of us do?
The Washington Post · by Josh RoginColumnist December 9, 2021 at 6:14 p.m. EST · December 9, 2021
6. Diplomatic Courier’s Best Books of 2021
Some good books on this list. More to add to the "to read" pile.
Diplomatic Courier’s Best Books of 2021
"What makes a book a “best of the year?” Is it sales figures or the ranking on Amazon’s bestseller list? Is it the way that it captures the zeitgeist of the moment? Is it challenging, racy, or controversial? Or is it something else entirely? For me, when I think of a best book, it’s a book that springs to mind as if it is on the tip of my tongue. When someone asks “what’s the best book you’ve read lately”, it’s the one (or half-dozen) that come immediately out—often before the questioner has the chance to regret their query. A best book is one that challenges preconceived notions, maybe exploring an already well-explored topic, but through a new lens. It’s a book that makes the reader look at the world from a different perspective.
I’m delighted to say that curating this list of the best books of 2021 was not an easy process, nor was down-selecting it to the ten included here. After reviewing nearly 45 books alone for Diplomatic Courier, I found it difficult to select the best ones this year. Each was a standout in its own right, ticking the boxes of offering enlightening perspectives, insightful commentary, and genuinely making me reflect on what I knew or thought I knew when it came to the subjects discussed. I always take away something from everything I read, but this year was particularly instructive, and to all the authors whose books I’ve read and reviewed—thank you.
“This is How They Tell Me the World Ends” by Nicole Perlroth immediately stood out for me when I first read it at the beginning of 2021. I wrote, then, that this book was easily a contender for best book of the year, and it’s nice to see my sentiment validated—it was recently awarded the Best Business Book of the Year by the FT and McKinsey. Nicole Perlroth’s book is a thrilling and alarming look at the zero-day exploit (cyber vulnerabilities for which there are no patches) market and arms race. She seamlessly blends deep research, exceptional journalism, and a flair for writing into a book that is a must read. By focusing on the people and not the technology, Perlroth brings to life just how vulnerable our digital lives are to disruption, particularly by a world that few would ever know existed. In so doing, she also manages to highlight the key challenges of the digital age: privacy and security, offense and defense, and peace and war.
Elbridge Colby’s “The Strategy of Denial” is a smart, serious, well-argued, and thorough look at a strategy for staunching China’s hegemonic ambitions. It has received some unfortunate and (to my mind) misinformed pushback from those who think Colby is advocating for war. This is far from the case. What Colby presents is an intellectual framework for thinking about what is inherently unthinkable. This is a book that presents a strategy for denying Beijing the freedom of hegemonic movement and for halting its potential predation on Taiwan. In this “The Strategy of Denial” is exceptionally successful. Colby does outline what a limited war with China would look like and how the anti-hegemonic coalition might fight such a conflict, but this is eminently sensible—there is a five-sided building along the Potomac filled with people whose job it is to plan for the worst-case scenario. Colby’s greatest contribution is that he raises the type of questions Washington should be asking, and which should serve as the starting point for a critical national debate.
While much has been said about China’s strategy to undermine the liberal international order, most of the commentary has focused on secondary sources, and very rarely what China is actually saying or doing. Rush Doshi’s “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order” is a brilliant corrective to this shortcoming. It is likely the finest book on not just Beijing’s strategy, but also its political, economic, and military implementation of that strategy over the last several decades. Using incredible primary source documents, Doshi masterfully lays out what the Chinese Communist Party says it is going to do, but also demonstrates what it is doing to fulfill those objectives. It is a fascinating companion book when read alongside Colby’s “The Strategy of Denial”. Doshi vividly illustrates the perils of strategic competition, something which Washington is slowly dawning to and in which it is beginning to engage.
August of this 2021 saw America’s overt presence in Afghanistan end. The precipitous and disastrous withdrawal exposed Washington’s strategic failure in that country, serving as a painful and indeed tragic closing chapter to the 20 year-long war. The war itself will undoubtedly be endlessly dissected, but perhaps one of the best contemporary books on Afghanistan is Wes Morgan’s “The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley”. Morgan focuses exclusively on the Pech Valley, home to some of the most violent and intense combat of the war from the opening salvo of the conflict through to America’s drawdown and shift to a predominantly special operations presence. Morgan’s micro-focus on that one valley exposes the innumerable macro-level challenges and shortcomings of the conflict from the absence of viable political ends, uncertainty over who the adversary was and is, and shows, tragically, how much was expended for so little gain.
That “To Boldly Go: Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond” makes this list should be a surprise to no one. I absolutely loved this book. This is the type of book I would want for Christmas. Unwrapping it Christmas morning, curling up under a blanket with my dogs on the couch, and diving into its amazing essays on what science fiction can teach us about leadership, strategy, and security. Editors Steven Leonard and Jonathan Klug should be commended for pulling together such a rich and enjoyable anthology. This is one of the rare essay collections where there isn’t a single misstep. Every chapter left me saying to myself “huh, I hadn’t thought of that” or “I never looked at that, that way”, and that is such a delightful feeling given the breadth of the universes covered in “To Boldly Go”. From Battlestar Galactica to Star Trek, the Planet of the Apes to Expanse, there is very little ground left uncovered. This is really the ultimate Christmas gift for the science fiction nerd or policy wonk in your life.
Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac have carved out a niche that ticks all the literary boxes for my personal interest. Their previous book “The Black Door” was a fascinating look at the relationship between prime ministers and their intelligence services. It is a weighty tome, so much so I had to order the hardback after the paperback was gifted to me, but it is breezily written and exceptionally accessible. When I saw that the duo were publishing another book, “The Secret Royals: Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana”, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy. Of course, thanks to supply chain issues and Covid, I had to wait longer than I wanted—to say nothing of a mysterious “delivery delay”—but I received it nonetheless and have savored every page. A riveting exploration of the relationship between the royal family and intelligence since Queen Elizabeth I through to Elizabeth II, “The Secret Royals” is beyond fascinating and every page contains a riveting story or anecdote, offering insights into the Royal Family and the British intelligence services, themselves.
For as much lexically changed in the shift from “great power competition” to “strategic competition”, much of the hyperbole and lazy analysis continued. Nowhere was this more evident than in the commentary on Russia, especially during the recent crisis surrounding Ukraine. Thankfully two books stood out as correctives to the prevailing story on Russia.
Dr. Kathryn Stoner’s “Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order” from the outset challenges the wisdom that Russia is a declining power with few assets beyond nuclear weapons and energy resources. While most argue that Russia is simply playing a weak hand well, Dr. Stoner provides a convincing argument that Russia’s hand is not nearly as weak as it seems. Rather, Russia has managed to recover from its beleaguered post-Cold War position, develop a stronger hand than the West assumes, and more importantly, is increasingly willing to play that hand on the international stage. If we continue to assess Russia’s power through American frames of reference alone, Washington will continuously underestimate Moscow’s ability to act on the world stage.
Washington also misunderstands Russia’s domestic politics. Here again it is less binary than most in the policymaking realm would prefer. Putin’s rule is vastly more complex and, while having authoritarian tendencies, he is not a dictator quashing all dissent. Authors Ben Noble, Jan Matti Dollbaum, and Morvan Lallouet brilliantly demonstrate just how rich, dynamic, and fascinating Russia’s internal politics are in their book “Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future” (a full review of which will be published, soon). The authors, using Alexei Navalny—the poisoned and now imprisoned opposition figure—as a hook, provide a far more complex and nuanced picture of Russia’s civil and political society. This is, absolutely, a biography of Navalny and the authors present a far more picture of the opposition figure than what is often presented in Western narratives. This is to be absolutely welcomed, but it is that deeply nuanced look at Russian politics that makes it so much more than just a biography.
Not all of my reading this year was non-fiction. This year had two standout fiction books, one which focused on the conflicts of the past and one on the potential wars to come. “Damascus Station” by David McCloskey is one of the best entries in the modern spy genre, blending an incredible attention to tradecraft detail with a riveting story set amongst the Syrian Civil War. Spy thrillers are all about the characters, and McCloskey brings his to life in rich and vivid detail, while introducing the complexities of the civil war. While I am predisposed to leeriness when it comes to sequels—the market is filled with books that rush through the third act and set up an inevitable, if unnecessary sequel—I very much hope McCloskey continues the story arc. Perhaps he could take a leaf from David Ignatius’ playbook and have key characters appear in other storylines. Just a thought.
“2034: A Novel of the Next World War” by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis looks at a potential war of the future, one where the United States does not enjoy uncontested military dominance. The strength of “2034” is that it focuses on the human dynamics of conflict much more than other books in the genre. This is a critical omission from the field and a welcome addition by the authors. One may quibble with some of the escalation dynamics in the story, but that is precisely the point—we don’t know how our leaders would react in a crisis when national honor, interests, and lives are on the line. This era of strategic competition will neither be neat nor clean. It cannot be waged clinically and the interconnections of America and China, and the broader world, are infinitely complex. Ackerman and Stavridis provide insight into the military dimension of this, something on which we need to critically reflect going into 2022.
In Memoriam
Portrait of John le Carré. Photo by Anton Corbijn.
This year saw the publication of the last, at least so far, of John le Carré’s novels, “Silverview”. Picking up his final book was a bittersweet moment. I’ve always looked forward to his next novel and it was no different this time, except knowing that it would be the last time I was doing so. I am, to the surprise of no one, somewhat compelled to pick up various copies of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” as I come across them—five or six by last count, all with different dust jackets or covers. I struggle and probably always will to convince myself to splurge and get that first edition hardcover that I’ve spied at one shop on a number of occasions. “Silverview” is classic le Carré. Its characters are complex without being caricatures, their motivations are unclear, its plot intricate, yet well told, and its setting second-to-none. I’m quite partial to the idea of a spy story taking place in the foreground of an independent bookstore, as Silverview’s story does. Le Carré’s books will always be literary comfort food for me, and he and his reflections on the world and espionage will be missed.
Wishing you and yours a happy, healthy, and safe holiday season. Here’s to a bright and better 2022!
About
:
Joshua C. Huminski is Director of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress. He can be found on Twitter @joshuachuminski.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
7. Election denier who circulated Jan. 6 PowerPoint says he met with Meadows at White House
Army colonels and their PowerPoint slides:
Philip Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN,” Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House.
Election denier who circulated Jan. 6 PowerPoint says he met with Meadows at White House
A retired U.S. Army colonel who circulated a proposal to challenge the 2020 election, including by declaring a national security emergency and seizing paper ballots, said that he visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election, spoke with President Donald Trump’s chief of staff “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed several members of Congress on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot.
Philip Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN,” Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House.
A version of the presentation made its way to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on Jan. 5. That information surfaced publicly this week after the congressional committee investigating the insurrection released a letter that said Meadows had turned the document over to the committee.
“The presentation was that there was significant foreign interference in the election, here’s the proof,” Waldron said. “These are constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.”
The PowerPoint circulated by Waldron included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred” or replace them with Republican electors. It included a third proposal in which the certification of Joe Biden’s victory was to be delayed, and U.S. marshals and National Guard troops were to help “secure” and count paper ballots in key states.
Although Trump at the time was pressuring Pence to delay certifying Biden’s victory, it is not clear how widely the PowerPoint was circulated or how seriously the ideas in it were considered. A lawyer for Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, said on Friday that there was no indication that Meadows did anything with the document after receiving it by email. “We produced it [to the committee] because it was not privileged,” Terwilliger said. A Meadows spokesman, Ben Williamson, declined to comment. Waldron said he was not the person who sent the PowerPoint to Meadows.
Still, Waldron’s account of his interactions with the White House, together with a 36-page version of the presentation that surfaced online this week and was reviewed by The Post, shed new light on the wild theories and proposals that circulated among the people advising Trump as they worked to overturn his election defeat, causing a crisis at the heart of government. They suggest that Meadows, who also pressed senior Justice Department leaders to investigate baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud, was more directly in contact with proponents of such theories than was previously known.
Waldron, a cybersecurity consultant who specialized in psychological operations during his military career, said that a meeting he and others had with Meadows in the days around Christmas turned to questions about how to determine whether the election had been hacked. He said Meadows asked, “What do you need? What would help?” Waldron said his team developed a list for Meadows with information on IP addresses, servers and other data that he believed needed to be investigated “using the powers of the world’s greatest national security intelligence apparatus.”
One person familiar with what Waldron called a “shopping list” confirmed the efforts to assemble it. That person, like some others quoted in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Waldron said Meadows indicated that he would pass the list on to John Ratcliffe, then the director of national intelligence, but said he did not know whether Meadows ultimately did. Through a spokesman, Ratcliffe said he did not receive such a document.
One person familiar with the matter confirmed that Meadows met with Waldron at the White House in December, although a person familiar with Meadows’s thinking stressed that Meadows had “little or nothing to do” with Waldron and did not endorse the document. The person said that Meadows’s role, as chief of staff, was often to receive information and pass it along to an appropriate recipient. He said Meadows often did this without endorsing the substance of a given idea or suggestion.
Waldron said that he and Meadows “weren’t pen pals” and that their communication was often through Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who sometimes asked him to “explain this to Mark” over the phone. Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.
Waldron told The Post that he also attended a Nov. 25 meeting with Trump and several Pennsylvania legislators in the Oval Office. A person familiar with that meeting confirmed Waldron’s presence.
Waldron said he also once briefed Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) at the White House, in the chief of staff’s office, with Giuliani present. Graham did not respond to a request for comment.
In early January, Waldron was working alongside Trump’s attorneys Giuliani and John C. Eastman from a suite at the Willard hotel in downtown Washington, gathering purported evidence of election fraud, The Post previously reported. Waldron was a supporting witness for Giuliani at hearings on election fraud held by lawmakers in battleground states after the 2020 vote.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, said in a letter to Terwilliger this week that Meadows had turned over an email regarding a 38-page PowerPoint presentation “that was to be provided ‘on the hill’,” titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” The 36-page presentation reviewed by The Post and which Waldron shared with conservative broadcasters in January has the same title.
Two people familiar with Meadows’s evidence said that he had also turned over the presentation itself and that it was similar in substance to the 36-page presentation. “The overall conclusions are the same, but there are some small differences,” one of the people said. The people were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Having turned over this and other records that his attorneys say encompassed thousands of documents and messages, Meadows has rejected the committee’s demand that he appear for testimony, citing executive privilege. In a lawsuit, he has asked a judge to invalidate the panel’s subpoenas, calling them “overly broad and unduly burdensome.”
The committee plans to vote Monday on a recommendation that the House refer Meadows to the Justice Department for prosecution on a charge of contempt of Congress.
The role played after the election by Waldron is another example of how the president aligned himself with a cast of fringe personalities as he worked to sabotage the U.S. democratic process.
Waldron said in the interview that he traveled to Washington around Nov. 9 or 10, 2020, and first met a few days later with Giuliani and Giuliani’s associate Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner.
Waldron said he joined the Pennsylvania lawmakers in the Nov. 25 meeting with Trump in the Oval Office. During that period, the president was meeting with legislators from key states and urging them to reject the official vote counts in their states, according to previous reports.
Describing the meeting, Waldron told The Post that Trump “didn’t ask me anything.”
“I was just there. He was more interested in talking to the legislators and understanding what happened in the Pennsylvania elections. … It was very informal. He had a lot of conversation with state legislators and senators and just asked them, ‘What do you think?’ ”
A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Waldron said he went on to brief Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Johnson’s staff ahead of a Dec. 16 hearing on election fraud by the Senate Homeland Security Committee. In a statement to The Post on Friday, Johnson did not directly address whether Waldron had briefed him and his staff. “My staff took meetings from many who could offer their expertise on election security and to hear from those who had concerns about irregularities ahead of my December 16, 2020, hearing,” he said.
Waldron said that on Jan. 5 he was among about a half-dozen people who briefed several members of Congress in a congressional office. He declined to identify the members without their permission and said that others may have joined by video. The members were “shocked” by the presentation but did not commit to any action, Waldron recalled.
Waldron shared the 36-page presentation with the hosts of a conservative podcast and an online talk show later in January and discussed parts of it in interviews with them.
Waldron, 57, who is based in Dripping Springs, Tex., told The Post that before the election, he started working with the Texas company Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG). Russell J. Ramsland Jr., ASOG’s leader, was also photographed at the Willard in the days before the riot, and Eastman told The Post that he met Ramsland around that time. Over the previous two years, the firm promoted claims about the dangers of electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors, The Post has reported.
Ramsland said in an email to The Post that he did not know who put the PowerPoint presentation together or who sent it to Meadows. He did not answer a question about his presence at the Willard or his relationship to Giuliani’s team.
In 2018 and 2019, when Meadows was a congressman from North Carolina, his campaign paid ASOG more than $700 for “security services,” according to campaign finance disclosures.
Waldron served in the Army, Army Reserve, Texas Army National Guard and the Individual Ready Reserve from May 1986 to June 2016 and received multiple service awards, an Army spokesman told The Post last year, adding that Waldron retired as a psychological operations and civil affairs officer. Waldron was deployed to Iraq from 2004 to 2005, the spokesman said.
Waldron has said that the team behind the PowerPoint included former intelligence officers and military veterans and was supported by hundreds of “digital warriors” who provided research. Jovan H. Pulitzer, a Texas-based entrepreneur who is a vocal election denier, told The Post that he contributed material for it.
“It was a pretty wide variety of folks from around this country that jumped in to say how can we help,” Waldron told The Post.
The Waldron team’s 36-page presentation includes several slides that were previously published elsewhere, including graphs purporting to show “vote injections” in key states including Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Some of the graphs appeared in a Nov. 24 blog post by Patrick Byrne, the founder and former chief executive of Overstock.com. The following day, Waldron held up a copy of the Pennsylvania graph when he testified in support of Giuliani at a meeting with state legislators in Gettysburg. Waldron claimed that the graph showed “spike anomalies” that were signs of fraud.
The Arizona graph appeared, with the same design, text and font, in a Dec. 1 affidavit from Ramsland that pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell included as purported evidence of fraud in a lawsuit seeking to “decertify” Arizona’s election results.
Waldron noted to The Post that the presentation did not advocate violence as a tactic to delay certification of Biden as winner. “Violence is absolutely the last thing that anybody on our team espoused,” he said.
Since January, Waldron has built a significant following among Trump supporters by continuing to spread false claims about election fraud, including onstage at an August conference hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Waldron also has promoted the ongoing campaign for “audits” of the 2020 election, including the Republican-commissioned review of 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz.
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann consulted Waldron in deciding to hire the Florida firm Cyber Ninjas to conduct that review, according to text messages that the nonprofit American Oversight obtained through a public records request.
Waldron was named in a 2020 state corporate filing as the chief executive of PointStream Inc. of Dripping Springs, which bills itself as a discreet cybersecurity firm. Specialties that PointStream touts on its website include “deep access to the Internet of Things, Social Media, and Dark Web,” conducting untraceable “cyber lurking,” and providing data sets “virtually unknown” to either private industry or the U.S. government.
PointStream was awarded a little over $60,000 in federal contracting in 2018. Spending records show the award was for “highly adaptive cybersecurity services” for the Defense Department’s U.S. Southern Command.
Waldron also has worked as a firearms instructor and owns a distillery, according to a company website and a state corporate filing.
Aaron C. Davis contributed to this report.
8. UAE halts construction of Chinese military facility in country after US pressure: Reports
UAE halts construction of Chinese military facility in country after US pressure: Reports
Last Updated: 12th December, 2021 14:29 IST
UAE recently ordered halting of a construction on the Chinese facility in country after US warned that Beijing wanted to use the site for military purposes.
Written By
Image: AP
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently ordered the halting of construction on a Chinese facility in the country after American officials warned that Beijing wanted to use the site for military purposes, ANI reported citing a top UAE source. Work at the Chinese site was halted at the request of Washington, according to Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic adviser to the UAE's leadership, The Wall Street Journal reported. However, he stated that the UAE did not believe the facility was meant for military or security purposes, according to WSJ. According to those acquainted with the case, this project near Abu Dhabi was suspended after multiple rounds of meetings and visits by US authorities.
After intelligence services in Washington learned that Beijing was secretly constructing what they suspected to be a military facility at a port, the Biden administration cautioned the Emirati administration that a Chinese military presence in the middle-eastern country may jeopardise bilateral relations. Despite the project's portrayal as entirely commercial, US intelligence has spotted ships disguised as commercial vessels approaching the port that authorities recognised as a kind normally used by the Chinese military for signals intelligence collection, according to WSJ.
UAE never had agreement or plan to host Chinese military base
A representative for the UAE Embassy in Washington stated in a statement that the UAE "never had an agreement, plan, talks or intention to host a Chinese military base or outpost of any kind," ANI reported. This development comes at a time when Beijing has attempted to establish commercial ports in outposts around the world, in what many believe is a clear move to strengthen its military footprint. However, last month, according to various media reports, after significant US pressure, the Biden administration was able to suspend the construction of a covert development inside a Chinese shipping port in the UAE, one of the US's closest Mideast friends.
China has previously built commercial ports in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, as well as its first foreign military base in Djibouti. Earlier, the former administration of Donald Trump attempted to put pressure on the UAE to halt the project at the port, which is run by a Chinese shipping conglomerate.
(With inputs from agencies)\
9. Washington considers shift to ‘sole purpose’ use of nuclear arms
Conclusion:
Although the no first use policy has been excluded in the upcoming NPR, such moves can weaken the nuclear umbrella provided by the United States in any way amid growing nuclear threats from China and North Korea. If the sole purpose policy is put in place, threats incurred by biochemical or cutting-edge conventional weapons may not be subject to nuclear deterrence anymore.
Washington considers shift to ‘sole purpose’ use of nuclear arms
Posted December. 11, 2021 07:14,
Updated December. 11, 2021 07:14
Washington considers shift to ‘sole purpose’ use of nuclear arms. December. 11, 2021 07:14. weappon@donga.com.
The United States has reportedly considered a shift in its nuclear policy to restrict use of nuclear arms to the “sole purpose” of retaliation, according to The Financial Times (FT) from Britain on Thursday (local time). Amid a growing opposition from its alliances, the Biden administration has decided not to adopt the “no first use” policy but to include the sole purpose principle in the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).
An anonymous source was quoted as saying that the U.S. government will show President Joe Biden options for declaratory policy called “sole purpose” sooner or later, reported the FT, adding that it aims to increase some clarity about when nuclear weapons could be put in practice. It is expected that the White House on Friday (local time) will hold a ministerial meeting to discuss the NPR which will involve the policy in question. Washington plans to publish a new NPR in January.
It has been almost a year since Washington engaged in talks with its alliances including South Korea to decide whether to include the no first use and sole purpose policies in a new NPR. In particular, the no first use policy has garnered great concerns from alliances as Washington would not take nuclear action preemptively unless any nuclear attack is carried out. They argue that any declaratory policy by Washington with some restrictions on use of nuclear power will make it hard to efficiently rein in nuclear states, which apparently hesitate to make a hasty decision to threaten them for fear of Washington’s revenge.
Although the no first use policy has been excluded in the upcoming NPR, such moves can weaken the nuclear umbrella provided by the United States in any way amid growing nuclear threats from China and North Korea. If the sole purpose policy is put in place, threats incurred by biochemical or cutting-edge conventional weapons may not be subject to nuclear deterrence anymore.
10. Refugee aid groups in Washington region overwhelmed by Afghan caseloads
Refugee aid groups in Washington region overwhelmed by Afghan caseloads
Refugee resettlement groups in the Washington region are scrambling to keep up with a massive influx of Afghan evacuees, leaving families waiting for housing and other services in a situation that could soon worsen as U.S. officials prepare to shut down temporary housing sites in military bases.
Since the historic airlift out of Kabul in August, more than 3,700 Afghan evacuees have been resettled in the District, Maryland and Virginia, the bulk of them arriving under “humanitarian parole” and their future in the country uncertain.
Resettlement agencies say the flood of Afghans that federal officials have sent to the region — primarily Northern Virginia — has been faster than expected, putting a strain on caseworkers and other personnel whose numbers were cut during the Trump administration, when the number of refugees allowed to enter the country was steadily reduced to historical lows.
Before the Kabul airlift, “We had the staffing level to serve 500 people a year,” said Kristyn Peck, chief executive of Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area (LSSNCA), one of three local resettlement groups serving Northern Virginia.
Peck has hired 35 additional workers since July — but, she said, “You can’t go to a staffing level to serve 500 people a month overnight.”
“We just know that at this volume, frankly, our quality is suffering,” she said.
Federal and state officials have tried to ease the burden by imposing some restrictions on who can receive aid in areas that already have a high number of evacuees, an attempt to also control the impact on schools and the local supply of affordable housing.
For example, resettlement agencies in Northern Virginia — a magnet for evacuees because of the region’s already large Afghan population, but with a costly housing market that has made finding permanent homes challenging — are now assigned cases only where the evacuees have a family connection in the region who can temporarily house them.
Evacuees who show up to their offices without first being assigned to their organization by the U.S. State Department are either being turned away or provided with limited aid, such as food stamps and basic medical care.
“We’re not stopping anybody at one point or another from coming to Virginia,” said Seyoum Berhe, the state refugee coordinator through the Virginia Department of Social Services. “But if we’re going to provide services, you must have a family connection. We want to do the best job we can but have to take numbers that we can at least attempt to manage.”
The evacuees are each entitled to receive $2,275 in federal support that is meant to cover housing costs, job training and other expenses over a three-month period once they are matched with a resettlement agency.
The high demand for such aid was on display inside the LSSNCA’s office in Annandale one recent morning. Clusters of evacuees arrived to an increasingly full lobby to see case managers who were already busy with other clients.
Nahzatullah Wror, 29, didn’t have an appointment that day. But after arriving in the United States the week before, he traveled an hour from his uncle’s home in Loudoun County to see what kind of help his family of four could get after not hearing from their overburdened case manager. The case manager showed up at Dulles International Airport 2½ hours late the day the Wror family arrived from Poland, where the family spent three months at a hotel.
“This is not the way that we should be treated,” said Wror, who has a special immigrant visa after working with U.S. officials as a psychological operations specialist for the former Afghan National Army.
“I know that I am a load on my uncle,” he said. “We’re 10 people living in two bedrooms. That’s really difficult.”
Federal officials say they are working to spread the evacuees to different parts of the country as they begin to shut down the temporary housing camps at seven military bases that are still home to 34,000 Afghans. The process is expected to be completed by mid-February.
For example, the evacuees are being offered free housing in Oklahoma, officials said. They are also pointed to other parts of the country with more job opportunities.
“We are tying to implement a system here that allows for the successful permanent resettlement of our new Afghan neighbors across the country in places that meet their needs,” said Curtis Ried, deputy to former Delaware governor Jack Markell, the White House’s point person on Afghan resettlement. “But we also don’t want to overwhelm any one area.”
But not everyone wants to disperse to parts unknown in the country. One is a 32-year-old man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for his family’s safety.
Last month, he and his wife took their three children out of the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey when it appeared likely that they would be paired with a resettlement group in a different part of the country.
They arrived in Alexandria and — borrowing from friends in the area — rented a $2,000-per-month apartment with no means of keeping the home. The man traveled from resettlement agency to resettlement agency in the region in search of long-term aid before finding help at Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington.
“They will send you to Alaska or Arizona,” he explained about his move, while his wife baked Afghan bread in their newly renovated kitchen. “I don’t have support there. I don’t know the culture there.”
Local resettlement agencies say they’re seeing the effects of that desire to stay in the Washington region.
Peck said her organization initially committed to serving 1,775 evacuees during the federal fiscal year that began in October. Then, the Biden administration asked the organization to increase that number to 2,400, assigning those extra evacuees to the LSSNCA within two weeks with the understanding that more will come, she said.
The Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) committed to serving 400 evacuees at its main office in Arlington County, also more than the group initially told federal officials it would be able to handle, said Emily Gilkinson, a group spokesperson. More than 200 of those evacuees have already shown up, with the rest expected within the next two months, she said.
“Our Arlington office and other offices are all staffing up,” said Gilkinson, adding that the ECDC expects to serve a total of 6,000 evacuees at its 21 sites nationwide. “They are receiving more than double the number of cases that they received in all of 2021 in just a few months, so the challenge is immense.”
Complicating matters is the fact that many of the evacuees arrived in the United States without IDs or other documents proving who they are, making it harder to set them up with homes and work authorization, aid groups say.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, chief executive of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the LSSNCA’s parent organization, said that issue points to a longer-term problem for the Afghans who arrived under humanitarian parole. The designation grants them permission to remain and work in the United States for two years, with no path to U.S. citizenship.
Many might want to apply for asylum, a lengthy process requiring a lot of documentation that they didn’t consider when they were destroying their IDs and other records on their way out of Afghanistan to avoid being targeted by the Taliban, Vignarajah said.
“But that same documentation that might be a death sentence in Afghanistan could be the key to win an asylum case here in the U.S.," she said. Vignarajah, along with other advocates, has been pushing for Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would allow evacuees to apply for lawful permanent residence, which would eliminate the need for an asylum application.
The Biden administration has also been pushing for such a law while steering more funds toward Afghan resettlement. Since September, an additional $13.3 billion has been authorized for that effort.
Berhe, the refugee coordinator for Virginia, said the extra funds — amounting to $30 million in his state over a three-year period — will help with mental health counseling, job training and, more urgently, emergency housing assistance.
That could help the scores of evacuees who have shown up to the region from the military bases with no guarantee of local aid and no job prospects.
Bita Golshan Lotfi, director of Immigrant and Refugee Services, said her McLean-based nonprofit has helped nearly 60 such families connect with a resettlement group while supplying them with donated clothes and food.
“They’re coming without a resettlement agency, without furniture, without anything,” she said.
11. Vaccine holdouts in U.S. military approach 40,000 even as omicron variant fuels call for boosters
Some have called this a "force shaping" action.
I am concerned about the long term effects of this. Not only the potential for a large exodus of trained military personnel but long term implications for trust in the military leadership, for recruiting in the future, the creeping influence of politics on military good order and discipline and decision making, and the ability to implement future policies that might even be less politically controversial.
Excerpts:
While overall the vast majority of service members are fully vaccinated, military analysts have characterized the number of refusals and holdouts as a troubling indicator in a rigid, top-down culture where decision-making often is predicated on the understanding that the troops will do as they are told. It also suggests the nation’s divisive politics have influenced a small but significant segment of the Defense Department, historically an apolitical institution.
Military leaders have few options to address the dissent other than to hope that, as waiver requests are denied, more troops will choose to fall in line. The alternative, the Pentagon has said, is to purge the ranks of those failing to meet requirements, though some of those roughly 40,000 service members opting out had already planned to leave the military.
“We know there’s some more work to do,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Friday. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who four months ago mandated vaccination for every service member, “expects 100 percent” compliance, Kirby said.
But the numbers are unlikely to change much before Wednesday, when the Army’s deadline arrives and all 1.3 million active-duty personnel are expected either to be fully vaccinated or have an exemption in hand.
Vaccine holdouts in U.S. military approach 40,000 even as omicron variant fuels call for boosters
The number of active-duty U.S. military personnel declining to be vaccinated against the coronavirus by their prescribed deadlines is as high as 40,000, with new Army data showing that, days ahead of its cutoff, three percent of soldiers either have rejected President Biden’s mandate or sought a long-shot exemption.
While overall the vast majority of service members are fully vaccinated, military analysts have characterized the number of refusals and holdouts as a troubling indicator in a rigid, top-down culture where decision-making often is predicated on the understanding that the troops will do as they are told. It also suggests the nation’s divisive politics have influenced a small but significant segment of the Defense Department, historically an apolitical institution.
Military leaders have few options to address the dissent other than to hope that, as waiver requests are denied, more troops will choose to fall in line. The alternative, the Pentagon has said, is to purge the ranks of those failing to meet requirements, though some of those roughly 40,000 service members opting out had already planned to leave the military.
“We know there’s some more work to do,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Friday. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who four months ago mandated vaccination for every service member, “expects 100 percent” compliance, Kirby said.
But the numbers are unlikely to change much before Wednesday, when the Army’s deadline arrives and all 1.3 million active-duty personnel are expected either to be fully vaccinated or have an exemption in hand.
Posing added concern, officials have said, is the emergence of the virus’s omicron variant, which public health experts fear may elude — to an extent that’s still unknown — the protection afforded by existing vaccine regimens. In response, the Biden administration has begun an aggressive campaign urging those eligible to get booster shots, though it’s unclear how this may impact federal policies. It’s an active discussion among Pentagon leadership, Kirby said, noting that, for now, the Defense Department is encouraging troops to get the extra shot.
“Rest assured,” Kirby added, “that should there be an addition to that in terms of the mandatory vaccine requirement, we will clearly communicate that and be transparent about it.”
The more than 14,000 Army personnel who remain unvaccinated join another 25,000 approximately in the active-duty Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps who have also challenged the Biden administration’s directive, according to a review of each service’s official data. An additional 10,700 troops in the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard remained unvaccinated past their Dec. 2 deadline, pushing the military’s overall tally of holdouts closer to 50,000.
Numbering roughly 475,000, the Army is the largest of the military services and set the last deadline by which active-duty troops were required to comply with the mandate. The Air Force, which had the military’s most ambitious deadline of Nov. 2, continues to process thousands of appeals from airmen who declined to be vaccinated on medical or religious grounds. The Navy Department, which includes the Marine Corps, has said personnel should expect very few waiver requests to be granted.
Officials have said such exemptions would be exceedingly rare. To date, across the entire military, only a handful of permanent medical waivers have been approved but so far no religious exemptions.
The Navy Department set a Nov. 28 deadline and vowed to move aggressively in discharging those who decline to follow orders. Like the Air Force, the Navy said service members have five days to start vaccinations if their exemptions are denied. The Army took a softer approach, saying that vaccine refusers would undergo counseling before facing punitive action that would threaten their careers, though continued defiance would risk dismissal.
That tens of thousands of troops are opting out raises questions about the state of military culture, which fundamentally survives on compliance, said Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank.
“It goes against military values of following through with lawful orders,” she said. “It raises questions about the posture of the services in other uncomfortable situations,” she added, like large-scale military operations where hesitating to act on orders in some situations can be disastrous.
Active-duty troops account for 1.3 million of the 2.1 million personnel of the Pentagon’s total force, which includes military reservists in each of the four service branches and the soldiers and airmen who constitute each state’s National Guard. The Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard have had their deadline pass. Navy and Marine reservists — where about 18,000 have not received any dose — face a Dec. 28 deadline.
The Army set the National Guard and Reserve deadline for the end of June, and a combined total of about 170,000 soldiers have not received any shot, their numbers show. Defense officials have said rates in the Guard and Reserve may be higher than what’s reflected in official data, as some service members may have gotten vaccinated on their own but haven’t yet reported it.
Coronavirus vaccines became available to military personnel starting in late 2020. The Pentagon mandate dates to August, when Austin announced that, as a part of the administration’s broader plan for jump-starting stagnant vaccination rates across the country, coronavirus shots would be added to the bloc of compulsory immunizations for all U.S. troops — a list that includes injections to ward off hepatitis A and B, Measles, mumps, rubella and other maladies.
Republicans in Congress, and at least one GOP governor, have questioned the president’s authority to direct such a mandate, with many arguing that vaccination should be a personal choice. Some lawmakers warned there would be an exodus of experienced personnel as a result. A similar directive for federal contractors to be vaccinated or submit to regular testing also sparked blowback, and in recent days two Senate Democrats — Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Sen. Jon Tester (Mont.) — backed a Republican proposal seeking to undo Biden’s vaccination rules for private employers.
12. U.S. universities keep ties to Chinese schools that support China’s military buildup, report says
U.S. universities keep ties to Chinese schools that support China’s military buildup, report says
The relationships are entirely legal and American universities often tout their ties to “sister” Chinese universities as an academic strength.
NBC News · by Dan De Luce · December 10, 2021
Dozens of U.S. universities maintain ties to Chinese universities that conduct defense research in support of Beijing’s military buildup, including work related to the country’s nuclear weapons program, according to a new report released Thursday.
The partnerships are part of a broader effort by China to leverage its access to U.S. research institutions to acquire technology and knowledge that could benefit its expanding military, according to the report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.
But the relationships are entirely legal and American universities often tout their ties to “sister” Chinese universities as an academic strength, providing students and scholars with an educational opportunity to collaborate and learn about Chinese language and culture.
The think tank report does not provide new evidence that U.S. universities have failed to safeguard sensitive, national security-related research, but it argues that policy makers and university administrators need to take a closer look at relationships with Chinese universities linked to Beijing’s military-industrial complex.
The U.S. government should establish “legal and regulatory guardrails to neutralize China’s ability either to acquire foundational knowledge or to access more sensitive research being conducted on U.S. college campuses,” the report said.
China was focused not only on classified or sensitive material but all relevant information that could bolster its military and technological might, said Craig Singleton, the report’s author.
“While the U.S. government often twists itself into knots determining what is classified or unclassified, the Chinese government often sees little-to-no distinction. Instead, Beijing is focused on collecting and harnessing any and all useful information to power its defense modernization,” Singleton said. “This includes everything from foundational knowledge taught on U.S. college campuses to cutting edge research, much of which is not technically classified but still has potential military applications.”
China’s embassy in the U.S. rejected the accusation that Beijing was trying to exploit academic cooperation between U.S. and Chinese universities.
Education exchanges and cooperation have helped enhance “mutual understanding” and have been “mutually beneficial, above-board and beyond reproach,” Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told NBC News in an email. “We urge relevant people in the U.S. to respect basic facts and stop making irresponsible remarks.”
The report said that not all collaboration between U.S. and Chinese universities poses a risk, and that the main problem was linked to a relatively small number of Chinese institutions that are conducting defense research. Of China’s more than 3,000 universities, roughly 90, or less than three percent, have direct ties to the country’s military and security establishment, according to the report.
The report, citing public documents, said three universities, Arizona State University, the University of Utah and Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state, have partnerships with Sichuan University, which appears on a U.S. government blacklist for allegedly supporting China’s nuclear weapons program.
The Commerce Department’s entity list identifies Sichuan as an “alias” for a Chinese center overseeing nuclear weapons research, the China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP).
Sichuan hosts at least three defense labs that focus on nuclear science and technology, physics and material sciences, according to the report, which cited public documents from China.
Other universities maintain ties to Chinese institutions linked to nuclear weapons research, according to the report.
Since 2014, the University of California at Santa Barbara has had a partnership with Shandong University, which works on China’s nuclear weapons program, according to the report.
The University of Utah, Pacific Lutheran, Arizona State and UCSB did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Oct. 19, 202104:12
Stanford University has an agreement with Peking University, which has close links to the China Academy of Engineering Physics, a center for nuclear weapons research. Peking established a center with CAEP in 2017 on applied physics, and has acknowledged the center serves China’s defense goals, the report said.
A Chinese defense industrial agency has recognized Peking University’s work in nuclear physics, nuclear technology and nuclear chemical engineering as supporting China’s defense industry, according to the report. Peking University signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Chinese navy in 2013.
Stanford University defended its partnership with Peking University, which includes a campus in China.
“We are vigilant to concerns about U.S. national security and our international engagement is guided by university policies and in compliance with federal regulations,” said Dee Mostofi, spokesperson for Stanford.
The Confucius Institute at Stanford, part of its partnership with Peking University, focuses on Chinese art, literature, history and culture, according to Mostofi. The institute operates without restrictions or influence by the Chinese government over personnel or the content of instruction, the spokesperson said.
The institute was set up with a one-time irrevocable gift from the Office of Chinese Language Council International and the university does not rely on any annual contributions from China, Mostofi said. “Because their contribution is an irrevocable gift, they have no leverage to infringe on academic freedom at Stanford, nor have they tried,” Mostofi said.
“Stanford continues to support the conditions that foster the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge, including the exchange of people and ideas with domestic and international collaborators,” she added.
China has funded the establishment of Confucius Institutes at college campuses across the U.S. and around the world, portraying them as a way to promote instruction in Chinese language and culture. But the U.S. government and lawmakers have labeled the institutes as vehicles for propaganda, and accused China of using the centers to restrict dissent among Chinese students abroad.
Congress has restricted Defense Department research funding for universities that host Confucius Institutes. The legislation and more scrutiny from politicians prompted the closure of dozens of institutes, with the number dropping from 113 to 34 since 2018, according to the report.
But among 78 universities that announced they were shutting their Confucius Institutes, 28 have maintained or expanded their relationships with Chinese sister universities, including many that have links to China’s defense industry, the report said.
Purdue University shut its Confucius Institute in 2019 but has kept its academic partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). The Chinese university hosts three defense laboratories, has an agreement with the Chinese military’s academy of military science for joint military research, and the dean and chief professor of its school of information security previously worked for the Chinese military, according to the report.
After receiving a briefing recently on the FDD report’s findings, Purdue reviewed its arrangements and canceled some of its programs with SJTU, including a doctorate-level program, according to the report.
“Several of the identified partnerships were either dormant or had not yet yielded any activity, and after extensive risk-based reviews, we formally terminated two agreements and shuttered a dual-degree program that had not yet begun accepting students," Purdue University spokesperson Tim Doty told NBC News.
“Protection of national security is Purdue’s primary interest, and the university is a nationally recognized leader for its efforts in research security,” Doty said.
The university’s engagements were developed in accordance with U.S. government policies and regulations, and Purdue values its diverse international population of faculty, students and other scholars, he said.
He added, “We do not and will not hesitate to take action and exit any agreement which threatens national security.”
Texas A&M closed its Confucius Institute but has preserved its partnership with China’s Ocean University. The Chinese university has a secret-level Chinese security clearance, allowing it to conduct classified defense research. Ocean University has cooperative agreements with the Chinese navy and has collaborated with the navy’s submarine academy, according to the report.
A university spokesperson said programs that were not part of the Confucius Institute have continued to operate.
“Notably, they involved non-sensitive information such as climate simulation. This relationship is part of a much larger international program focused on gathering non-sensitive data for fundamental climate science,” the spokesperson said in an email.
“Texas A&M is committed to the highest level of research integrity and engagement of global partners. We embrace a culture that values diversity in thought and an environment that promotes innovation and creativity in research,” the spokesperson added.
NBC News · by Dan De Luce · December 10, 2021
13. Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans
Long read.
A bizarre story. Spoiler alert: after completing reading this I was not satisfied that there is any conclusion to this episode and what is going to result from it, if anything.
Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans
It was almost 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Ali Watkins was walking around the capital following instructions texted by a stranger. One message instructed her to walk through an abandoned parking lot near Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, and then wait at a laundromat. Then came a final cryptic instruction: She was to enter an unmarked door on Connecticut Avenue leading to a hidden bar.
The Sheppard, an upscale speakeasy, was so dimly lit it was sometimes hard to see the menu, let alone a stranger at the bar. But amid the red velvet upholstery, Watkins, then a reporter at Politico, almost immediately spotted the man she was supposed to meet: He was wearing a corduroy blazer and jeans and had a distinctive gap between his teeth.
“I won’t tell you my name, but I work for the U.S. government,” he said, according to her account later provided to government investigators.
It was June 1, 2017, and Watkins was a rising star in the world of national security journalism, breaking big stories about the investigation into President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. She had hopped from the Huffington Post to BuzzFeed and then Politico, when a man writing under the pseudonym Jack Bentley had reached out, wanting to meet with her. She agreed, as journalists often do, thinking he might be a potential source.
Ali Watkins during a PBS interview about her reporting on Russian espionage, June 1, 2017. (PBS/YouTube)
Once at the bar, however, she found that the man seemed more interested in gathering information about her than in providing her with information. And he appeared to know a lot about her, including details of her travels and her relationship with James Wolfe, an older man who worked on Capitol Hill.
The meeting, which lasted almost four hours, would change both of their lives. Late the following year, Wolfe, the onetime boyfriend of Watkins, was sentenced to two months in prison for lying to the FBI about his relationship with reporters. And Watkins, by then at the New York Times, faced ethical questions about her relationship with Wolfe, even though she denied he had been a source for her stories while they were involved.
The true mystery of the saga was the role of the man at the bar. He was portrayed in subsequent articles as something of a rogue actor who had taken it upon himself to conduct a Trump-era leak investigation, and he subsequently faced an internal investigation at the Department of Homeland Security, where he worked.
Yet documents obtained by Yahoo News, including an inspector general report that spans more than 500 pages — and includes transcripts of interviews that investigators conducted with those involved, emails and other records — reveal a far more disturbing story than the targeting of a single journalist. The man, whose real name is Jeffrey Rambo, worked at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The division, which still operates today, had few rules and routinely used the country’s most sensitive databases to obtain the travel records and financial and personal information of journalists, government officials, congressional members and their staff, NGO workers and others.
As many as 20 journalists were investigated as part of the division’s work, which eventually led to referrals for criminal prosecution against Rambo, his boss and a co-worker. None were charged, however.
Rambo, who believes he was unfairly vilified for seeking out Watkins, said in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Yahoo News that he acted legally and appropriately. He agreed to speak amid what he describes as escalating threats against him in San Diego, where he now lives, and after Yahoo News obtained a copy of the inspector general investigation into Rambo and his colleagues.
“I’m being accused of blackmailing a journalist and trying to sign her up as an FBI informant, which is what’s being plastered all around San Diego at the moment because of misinformation reported by the news media,” he said in the interview.
The story Rambo tells is even stranger than the one already in the public view, which is strange enough. His meeting with Watkins, he says, was the result of a Trump-era White House assignment to Customs and Border Protection to combat forced labor. Rambo, the lead on the project, was authorized to reach out to anyone who he thought might be useful, including journalists and other people inside and outside the government.
As part of that process, he and others he worked with vetted those potential contacts, pulling email addresses, phone numbers and photos from passport applications and checking that information through numerous sensitive government databases, including the terrorism watchlist.
Jeffrey Rambo in his San Diego coffee shop, Storymakers Coffee Roasters. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)
“There is no specific guidance on how to vet someone,” Rambo later told investigators. “In terms of policy and procedure, to be 100 percent frank there, there's no policy and procedure on vetting.”
Those swept up in the division’s vetting included journalists from national news organizations, ranging from the Associated Press to the New York Times. Even Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post, was flagged in those searches.
“When a name comes across your desk you run it through every system you have access to, that's just status quo, that's what everyone does,” Rambo told investigators.
But the idea of government officials trawling through government databases, looking at the private lives — and even romantic relationships — of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime, is precisely what civil liberties experts have warned about for years.
“For two decades, we’ve seen how the collect-it-all, share-it-all philosophy underlying post-9/11 law enforcement floods agencies with sensitive personal information on millions of Americans,” Hugh Handeyside, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties National Security Project, told Yahoo News. “When agencies give their employees access to this ocean of information, especially without training or rigorous oversight, the potential for abuse goes through the roof.”
Rambo, however, doesn’t see his story as one of abuse. He was doing precisely what his higher-ups authorized him to do.
“I’m called a rogue Border Patrol agent, I’m called a right-hand man of the Trump administration, I accessed data improperly, I violated her constitutional rights — all of these things are untrue,” Rambo told Yahoo News. “All these things are standard practices that — let me rephrase that. All of the things that led up to my interest in Ali Watkins were standard practice of what we do and what we did and probably what’s still done to this day.”
CBP’s National Targeting Center was created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to help identify potential threats crossing the borders of the United States, whether people, drugs or weapons. When Rambo was detailed to the center in 2017, he was assigned to the newly launched Counter Network Division, a unit designed as a bridge between law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community that prided itself on taking “out of the box” approaches.
Freed from the constraints of bureaucracy, those inside were supposed to think creatively about how to solve problems. According to testimony in the inspector general report, Rambo’s supervisor, Dan White, fostered a freewheeling atmosphere at the division, calling his team “WOLF,” short for “way out in left field.” White even had a water bottle with a WOLF sticker. He himself would later tell investigators: “We are pushing the limits and so there is no norm, there is no guidelines, we are the ones making the guidelines.”
The division’s assignments were high-level and came directly from the CBP commissioner, the secretary of Homeland Security or the White House, which in May 2017 asked the division to look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the U.S. believed companies were using cobalt mined by forced labor to produce consumer goods in China. Rambo, one of few Border Patrol agents assigned to the division, where he worked alongside representatives from across law enforcement and intelligence agencies, was asked to lead the project. “My orders were to tackle a problem set that we were given from the White House,” he told Yahoo News.
Rambo, according to documents included in the inspector general report, was told to gather the evidence needed to hit companies with sanctions under the rarely used Tariff Act of 1930. He proposed using information from experts in academia, NGOs, humanitarian groups, officials at other government agencies and journalists specializing in forced labor reporting. The plan was greenlighted by his boss, he later told investigators, with one caveat. "Make sure you vet whoever you contact,” Rambo said White told him.
In late May 2017, Rambo and one of his co-workers began reaching out to people, including Martha Mendoza, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter who covered forced labor. On May 31, Rambo, using his government email, wrote to Mendoza explaining that CBP was trying to identify companies that were importing goods possibly linked to forced labor. “We are hoping to connect with subject matter experts outside of the traditional government circles as your ‘rules of engagement’ are a bit different than ours,” he wrote Mendoza, “and can perhaps help in pointing us in the right direction to U.S. companies that meet such criteria or are suspected of such.”
Associated Press journalist Martha Mendoza. (Khairil Yusof/Flickr)
Another reporter who caught his eye was Ali Watkins. On June 1, he spotted a Politico story by Watkins on how Russia’s spy games were heating up inside the United States. Her story, which came at the height of Trump administration concerns over leaks relating to the FBI’s Russia investigation, cited a half-dozen anonymous current and former intelligence officials. “Ali Watkins was, for lack of a better word, the hot-topic reporter at the time,” Rambo told Yahoo News.
Rambo, who was later pressed repeatedly about why he chose to reach out to Watkins, a reporter who had never written about forced labor, said he was looking for prominent journalists with access and buzz. He told investigators he wanted to identify national security journalists who could not just tell CBP about forced labor but also publish stories that would allow him to “overstate” U.S. enforcement capabilities. Rambo believed these stories inflating U.S. capabilities would prompt shippers to alter their routes, proving they were involved in illegal activities.
“I thought, ‘OK, I’ll use Ali Watkins,’” he said.
A former senior DHS official told Yahoo News that forced labor was indeed a concern of CBP.
“Forced labor was a priority of the administration. It’s a priority of the Senate Finance Committee that oversees U.S. Customs and Border Protection," the former official added. "It remains a bipartisan priority both for the anticompetitive aspects and trade perspective, but more importantly for the humanitarian aspects."
(“Committee staff are not aware of the Counter Network Division working on forced labor,” Keith Chu, a spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told Yahoo News. The staff were also not aware that Rambo’s leak investigation was done under the auspices of working on the forced labor issue, he added.)
Asked about Rambo’s plan, however, the official expressed surprise that such a thing would be pursued at CBP.
“I can tell you at minimum that is an overexuberant interpretation. CBP does not conduct psychological ops or misinformation campaigns. CBP is not a member of the intelligence community. CBP does not have the authorities to do those kinds of things,” the former senior official said.
Rambo believed he did have the authority, and he had certainly had his boss’s approval to contact Watkins. After reading her story, he did something that most journalists probably don’t expect government officials to do: He ran Watkins through an assortment of databases. Those included, among others, CBP’s Automated Targeting System, a tool that compares travelers against law enforcement and intelligence data; TECS, which tracks people entering and exiting the country; the Treasury Department’s FinCEN, used for identifying financial crimes; and the State Department consular database, which included details of her passport application.
“When you say vet someone, you vet them. There’s no parameters on what that means,” Rambo said.
“Vet the reporters you use,” Rambo said his boss told him, “‘vet them through our systems.’ I vet them no different than I vet a terrorist.”
On his screen was Watkins’s international travel, color-coded blue in a format similar to an Excel spreadsheet. He saw a flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sandwiched between two trips with the same person, a man more than 30 years her senior named James Wolfe. Together they traveled to Cancún, London and Spain, according to the inspector general report.
Recounting his search of Watkins’s travel, Rambo began to reenact what he saw as his “aha moment.”
“I know what suspicious travel looks like,” he said, recalling the moment he thought he had stumbled on something big: the mystery male companion.
“Who is James Wolfe?” he recalled asking himself, mimicking typing when describing his efforts to identify Watkins’s traveling companion.
James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee, leaves the federal courthouse in Washington on June 13, 2018. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Then he queried Watkins’s family members, thinking he might be related to her. Wolfe, he found, was not a family member but a senior staff member on Capitol Hill.
“Why is Ali Watkins flying with the head of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee?” Rambo recalled wondering, excited by his find.
But he already had a theory, one that would later be denied by Watkins. Wolfe, he surmised, was giving her information and access in exchange for a personal relationship with her.
“It’s reasonable for me to believe in exchange for personal trips she was given access to Guantánamo,” he recounted, unaware that the Pentagon regularly offers journalists the opportunity to travel to the U.S. naval base there to report on legal proceedings related to 9/11 detainees.
Rambo then went to his boss. “I say, ‘This person is great in terms of access, but based on my vetting she may be receiving classified info,'” he recalled to Yahoo News.
White later told investigators that the division would regularly conduct checks on journalists to determine their personal connections, to establish if they were someone CBP could trust.
“Figure it out,” White told Rambo. “If you can use her, use her. If not, don’t.”
That afternoon, Rambo reached out to Watkins using the address jackbentleyesq@gmail.com, which he later described as an “off network” account sanctioned by the Counter Network Division. “It wasn’t just some random alias I created just then to meet her,” he said during an interview in San Diego, where lives with his two dogs, father-and-son beagles named Jack and Bentley.
He would later defend using the Gmail account and a fake name, he said, because he didn't want to provide information on where he worked unless he deemed her trustworthy. He and his boss even discussed signing her up as a confidential human source — a highly unusual proposal for a journalist — so she would be locked into a confidentiality agreement, though the idea was never pursued.
Rambo and Watkins agreed to meet in Dupont Circle that evening.
As Rambo prepped for his meeting, he reached out to an old FBI counterterrorism contact, now at the bureau’s headquarters. “Can you give me a call,” Rambo wrote in an email. “If possible ASAP. I need to run something by you that I *believe* might be in your swim lane.”
At the bar, Rambo sipped WhistlePig old fashioneds and fired off questions to Watkins. Could he trust her? Had she ever burned a source? The questions began to unnerve Watkins, particularly when they revealed that Rambo appeared to know private details about her life, like where she had lived in New Jersey for a short period, and where she traveled. And yet they stayed in the bar for nearly two hours talking.
Around midnight, as the bar was closing, Rambo paid with a credit card, and they began walking together up the street toward Kramerbooks & Afterwords, a popular bookstore and café near Dupont Circle. Inside, Watkins said, Rambo was holding up books and magazines while talking, as if to conceal his identity.
At around 1 a.m. the two left Kramerbooks together and walked down the street.
Standing in front of a closed Starbucks, Rambo continued to press Watkins about her sources. Had she ever had an inappropriate relationship with a source? Had she ever done anything to compromise her journalistic integrity?
Watkins said no, but eventually told Rambo what he already suspected: She was involved with Wolfe, but she denied he was leaking to her. “I’ve never received information from that person,” she said, according to her account later.
“Do you know he is married?” Rambo asked, turning the cellphone in his hand around so Watkins could see.
“This is his wife,” Rambo said, apparently not realizing he was showing her a photo of Wolfe’s first wife (the two had divorced and Wolfe had remarried).
Rambo continued to ask about her relationship, and what would happen to her career if it was made public.
“Are you trying to blackmail me?” Watkins asked him. Rambo denied he was.
The two continued talking outside the Starbucks, with Rambo pressing her on Wolfe and her confidential sources. Watkins by then felt “spooked,” she later told investigators.
Rambo never revealed to Watkins where he was employed or his real name, but she later told investigators he insinuated he was working in the Washington metro area with the FBI.
“Here’s a tip,” he told her not long before they parted ways around 2 a.m. “Don’t travel together.”
The morning after the meeting, both Watkins and Rambo each set out to investigate the other.
Rambo emailed his FBI contact again. “Confirmed improper relationship between a member of the SSCI and the press,” he wrote, using an abbreviation for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Additional details in person if possible.”
“[Subject of investigation] is the SSCI Director of Security,” he added in another email an hour later.
That same day, Watkins returned to the Sheppard to get Rambo’s credit card slip, which had his real name. A quick Google search led to a story about a Border Patrol agent starting a brewery. She called CBP, gave his name and asked to be connected. After a brief silence, then a click, a phone rang. No one picked up. Still, she later told investigators, she took this as “quasi-confirmation” that Jack Bentley was Jeffrey Rambo. (Even several years later, Rambo is still furious at the bar for giving Watkins his credit card receipt. “Who owns that place? They gave her my personal information,” he fumed.)
Rambo didn’t know that she had identified his real name when, a few days after their meeting, he discussed with his boss, White, how to proceed. According to emails included in the inspector general report, Rambo was ready to hand everything over to the FBI, but his boss stopped him. White wanted to run Watkins through more DHS databases to find out if she had any sources inside the department, expanding the investigation. Rambo’s probe into Watkins and Wolfe also now had a name, taken from the whiskey he drank at the bar where he met Watkins: Operation Whistle Pig.
Rambo said Operation Whistle Pig was focused only on whether Wolfe was providing classified information to Watkins, or anyone else, but it appeared that a large number of journalists were caught up in the probe. “After ‘Operation Whistle Pig’ was approved, Rambo identified 15 to 20 national security reporters and conducted CBP records checks of those reporters,” according to a FBI counterintelligence memo included in the inspector general report.
Rambo in the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)
While the Justice Department has policies on seeking information from journalists or news organizations, the rules apply to records that require a subpoena or warrant, such as phone records, not information that the government already possesses. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department responded to questions about this.
White then introduced Rambo and another member of the team to Charlie Ratliff, a program analyst in the Counter Network Division. Ratliff worked on DOMEX, a program that collects information from the contents of a person’s electronic device when they cross a U.S. border. The controversial program sweeps up everything from phone contacts and emails to the contents from encrypted messaging apps and social media.
“We know you do high profile,” White told Ratliff, introducing him to Rambo.
Rambo explained to Ratliff that Watkins and Wolfe were having an “affair” and that Wolfe may have been leaking classified information to Watkins. Rambo gave Ratliff what are known as “selectors,” such as telephone numbers, email addresses and Social Security numbers. Ratliff, in turn, ran those selectors through a number of databases, including the Terrorist Screening Database, a watchlist that has more than 1 million names and has been widely criticized for errors and lack of review.
Watkins didn’t have any direct connections in that database, also known as TSDB, but one of her contacts did: Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post. “Oh….and the Huffington Post owner was/is a direct contact to a TSDB on 3 phones and 1 email. LoL,” Ratliff wrote in one email to White.
“It’s impossible for Arianna to comment, as she is completely unclear what her connection to the watchlist is,” a spokesperson for Huffington told Yahoo News.
Handeyside, the ACLU attorney, called the database “a due process disaster.”
“The standard for placement on the watchlist is so low, and the safeguards against errors and misplaced suspicion are so deficient, that it’s no wonder the watchlist has ballooned to well over a million people,” he said. “Having a connection to someone on the watchlist is not remotely suspicious of itself.”
Arianna Huffington at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in 2020. (David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
But it wasn’t just journalists being investigated, or “vetted,” in the parlance of the Counter Network Division. Ratliff, whose email signature was “In God We Trust. For Everyone Else We Vet,” created a PDF file later that month that included “several Congressional referrals,” according to the inspector general report. That PDF was then sent to CBP’s Analytical Management Systems Control Office, which is described in congressional testimony as dedicated to finding anomalies among the agency’s employees “to mitigate any potential threat to the CBP mission.”
According to White’s later testimony, Ratliff regularly investigated congressional staffers’ travel captured by CBP to run against the Terrorist Screening Database. “White stated that when Congressional ‘Staffers’ schedule flights, the numbers they use get captured and analyzed by CBP,” the inspector general report says. White told the investigators that Ratliff “does this all the time,” looking at “inappropriate contacts between people.” At one point in an email, Ratliff also references sending a PDF package listing several congressional members linked to people on the Terrorism Screening Database. It is unclear, based on the inspector general report, which members were identified.
Rambo then contacted analysts with Deloitte, a government contractor that had employees working directly for CBP’s Counter Network Division, who specialized in investigating people using social media and other open sources of information. “I sent them the link to that [Russia] article as context as to who Ali Watkins was and basically told them to move on with that to uncover what they could,” Rambo told investigators. He identified Watkins as a “primary target” of Operation Whistle Pig and Wolfe as an “associated target.”
Deloitte did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The Deloitte team soon sent back a bulletin pinpointing Watkins’s exact location on dates when they knew she was with Wolfe, like their trip to Spain. They also noted other geotagged Facebook check-ins during the time under scrutiny, including domestic travel to three states. The bulletin included information on her mother and brother and links to their profiles. Attached to the email were photos taken from Watkins’s Facebook profile showing her in Spain.
“Gracias,” Rambo replied.
There were conflicting accounts about how many other journalists, beyond Watkins, who were scrutinized by the Counter Network Division. White told investigators that in preparation for speaking with the Associated Press’s Mendoza, she was run through multiple databases, and “CBP discovered that one of the phone numbers on Mendoza’s phone was connected with a terrorist.”
In a statement to Yahoo, after being told of the investigation into one of its reporters, an AP spokesperson, Lauren Easton, blasted CBP.
“The Associated Press demands an immediate explanation from U.S. Customs and Border Protection as to why journalists including AP investigative reporter Martha Mendoza were run through databases used to track terrorists and identified as potential confidential informant recruits,” Easton told Yahoo News in a statement. “We are deeply concerned about this apparent abuse of power. This appears to be an example of journalists being targeted for simply doing their jobs, which is a violation of the First Amendment.”
According to a memo that Troy Miller, then the head of the National Targeting Center, provided to investigators, the division reached out to reporters at the Huffington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. “These entities were analyzed further to determine nexus to the information being provided to CBP in order to validate any future information that would be provided on alleged forced labor practices,” wrote Miller, who went on to become the acting CBP commissioner.
According to records included in the inspector general report, such vetting was standard practice at the division.
“I would just remove journalists from that question, to begin with,” Rambo later said when asked about the vetting process for journalists. “Just through day-to-day practice of how we operate, when you're told to vet somebody, that you vet them through all of those systems.”
A former New York Times reporter confirmed to Yahoo News that they met with Dan White and others at CBP to discuss trade-based money laundering, among other issues. “They also pitched me on the labor abuse work that CBP was doing,” the former Times reporter said.
"We are deeply troubled to learn how U.S. Customs and Border Protection ran this investigation into a journalist's sources,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, wrote to Yahoo News. “As the Attorney General has said clearly, the government needs to stop using leak investigations as an excuse to interfere with journalism. It is time for Customs and Border Protection to make public a full record of what happened in this investigation so this sort of improper conduct is not repeated."
The Justice Department and the White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including about the appropriateness of investigating journalists. A spokesperson for DHS referred requests for comment to CBP.
“CBP vetting and investigatory operations, including those conducted by the Counter Network Division, are strictly governed by well-established protocols and best practices,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a written statement to Yahoo News. “The Counter Network Division within U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) National Targeting Center (NTC) shares information with key partners, analyze threats, and enhances the U.S. government’s operational ability to combat illicit networks, including those associated with terrorists and transnational criminal organizations.”
“CBP does not investigate individuals without a legitimate and legal basis to do so,” the spokesperson added. “These investigations support CBP’s mission to protect our communities.”
Whatever Rambo’s original purpose for vetting Watkins, his focus in the days after meeting her was on furthering a leak investigation, and he appeared to view himself as a central player. “[M]y main concern is that encounters such as these are a large part of the leaks occurring and building it out could paint a better picture with regards to that if the dots can all be connected,” he wrote to the FBI on June 5.
And it was jusn’t just Watkins who interested him. When Reality Winner was arrested for leaking classified information about Russia to the Intercept that month, Rambo emailed the Deloitte contractors working with him a link to a news story about her arrest. “First of many,” one of the Deloitte contractors replied.
Rambo responded with just a photo of Omar Little, an iconic character from the long-running television series “The Wire” (Little is a criminal who operates according to a strict moral code). Underneath the image were the words “Omar Comin Yo,” a reference to his catchphrase meant to evoke fear and impending death. “As in Ali Watkins or James Wolfe is next in terms of being arrested for leaking information,” Wolfe told investigators when asked what he meant with the reply.
Over the summer, Rambo stayed on the leak investigation, even requesting another cellphone for his work with the FBI. In mid-July, he met with two FBI agents at an Au Bon Pain next to the Hoover building in downtown Washington, D.C., to relay what he knew about Watkins and Wolfe. He also sent them copies of their travel records plucked from CBP’s system. “Let me know if you need anything else specifically and I’ll get it to you ASAP,” Rambo told the FBI agents, according to an email he sent following the meeting.
“This is all great info. Thanks so much for your help,” one of the agents replied. “I’ll look over all of this and get a plan moving forward.”
On July 13, Rambo wrote the Deloitte team with good news. “Just as a heads up, ‘Whistle Pig’ was accepted as a full-blown case,” he wrote. “Just got confirmation yesterday so wanted to update you guys so you knew what became of it.”
While Rambo thought the case was moving forward, one of agents told him a month later they weren’t pursuing the investigation. In October, however, Rambo, who was now working for CBP in California, got a call. “The FBI just launched a media leak investigation unit, and suddenly they had all the interest in the world,” he recalled to Yahoo News.
He was also asked to sign a Classified National Security Disclosure Agreement preventing him from discussing his conversation with the FBI about Watkins and Wolfe, according to the inspector general report.
Finally, nearly a year later after his last conversation with FBI agents, Rambo’s work seemed to pay off: James Wolfe was indicted, not for leaking classified information but for lying to FBI agents about his relationship with reporters, including his travel with Watkins. (Wolfe did not respond to a request for comment.)
Wolfe leaves the federal courthouse in Washington on June 13, 2018. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
What should have seemed like good news for Rambo suddenly made him a lightning rod. On June 12, 2018, just a week after Wolfe was indicted, the Washington Post published an article about Rambo’s meeting with Watkins, identifying him by his real name. Rambo, who never realized she had learned his name, was blindsided.
Rather than a law enforcement officer working hand-in-hand with the FBI on an investigation, Rambo suddenly found himself painted as a rogue agent conducting his own leak investigation. “Rambo’s search of travel records could be a crime if he didn’t have a legitimate reason to examine that information,” the Post said it had been told by unnamed officials.
“Rambo was not part of the FBI’s investigation of Wolfe,” the Post reported, citing an anonymous law enforcement official.
The FBI nondisclosure agreement left Rambo hamstrung: He couldn’t correct the record or break his silence. “Knowing what I know now, I never would have signed it,” he said, adding that his lawyer has since told him it probably isn’t binding.
The FBI declined to comment on any aspect of this story.
White would initially claim to investigators that he wasn’t aware of Rambo’s meeting with Watkins. But he wrote an email to Ratliff the day after the article was published saying, “Thanks, now I just have to go back and recreate Rambo’s date night,” an apparent reference to the meeting at the Sheppard.
That same day, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General launched an investigation into Rambo, who was put on administrative leave. The probe, conducted jointly with CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility, focused on whether Rambo improperly accessed government databases to get information on Watkins and Wolfe without a need to know, and if he’d used that information to question Watkins about possible leaks of classified information outside the scope of his official duties.
Over the next two years, investigators interviewed Rambo, his supervisors, his co-workers and even Watkins. They also reviewed thousands of emails and records related to Rambo’s investigation into Watkins and Wolfe and his interactions with the FBI.
Rambo in the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)
The inspector general’s report found grounds for potential criminal charges against Rambo, including improperly accessing records, making false statements and conspiracy. White, who appeared to have lied about several aspects of his role in the Watkins probe, was referred to prosecutors for possible charges of conspiracy and making false statements, the latter being the same charge that sent Wolfe to prison. Ratliff, who helped Rambo with the searches, also faced potential charges.
White did not respond to a detailed request for comment. Yahoo News made multiple attempts to reach Ratliff, who it appears no longer works at CBP.
On Oct. 22, 2020, the Office of Inspector General presented the criminal referrals to Mark Lytle, the head of financial crimes at United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. In January, Lytle replied that it was declining to prosecute, based on several factors, including legal precedent on law enforcement use of databases and “the lack of CBP policies and procedures concerning Rambo’s duties.”
A spokesperson for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment. Lytle, who has since left the office, did not respond to requests for comment.
That doesn’t surprise Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and constitutional law expert who has reviewed surveillance programs. When the government wants to investigate someone for doing something illegal or inappropriate, it has free rein so long as it doesn’t violate any specific law. “If there is no law or policy that specifically regulates it, then there’s nothing that prohibits it,” he said.
But Handeyside, the ACLU attorney, says these very lack of procedures are the heart of the problem: “We’re in a very dangerous place if having no rules means officers can’t break any rules.”
Beyond the legal precedent, there was another reason prosecutors didn’t want to charge Rambo. “Chief Lytle also stated that it would not be very good jury appeal as Rambo’s actions revealed potential criminal violations by Wolfe, Rambo reported the information to the FBI, and Wolfe was later indicted,” the inspector general report states.
In response to questions about the results of its investigation, a spokesperson for the Office of Inspector General replied: “To maintain independence in appearance and fact, DHS OIG does not participate in DHS operational or programmatic decisions.”
Chu, the Wyden spokesperson, said the senator was only aware of the inspector general’s investigation from news reports. “The [Department of Homeland Security inspector general] was asked repeatedly for the results of its investigation, but never provided it,” he said.
Watkins, who still works as a reporter at the New York Times, expressed outrage over the new revelations about the investigation into her and Wolfe’s relationship. “I’m deeply troubled at the lengths CBP and DHS personnel apparently went to try and identify journalistic sources and dig into my personal life,” she told Yahoo News. “It was chilling then, and it remains chilling now.”
While acknowledging that her prior relationship with Wolfe was problematic for her reporting, she said that was no excuse for the government’s conduct. “My mistakes — none of which should have concerned Jeffrey Rambo or the CBP — have been more than clearly established in various records, including my employer’s,” she added. “Those mistakes were mine, not my family’s, and that their privacy was violated in this process is egregious.”
The same month that prosecutors told the inspector general they would not be pursuing charges, Rambo was taken off administrative leave and cleared to return to work as a Border Patrol agent. It wasn’t public vindication, but at least he had his job back.
Earlier this year, Jeffrey Rambo opened a small coffee shop in the Barrio Logan section of San Diego, home to a tight-knit Latino community. He says its name, Storymakers Coffee Roasters, is a tribute to the coffee producers the shop features. He’s also back in the field working as a Border Patrol agent, but he runs the coffee shop in his free time. He describes coffee roasting as his passion.
One of the keepsakes he has from his time in the Washington area is a large glass globe with cobalt blue oceans and clear land, an award from CBP for his work that came with a cash bonus. The globe is a reminder that, before the press coverage, he was lauded for his work at the National Targeting Center, including on the Watkins/Wolfe case. The plaque on the globe reads: “Jeffrey Rambo — In Honor and Recognition of Your Dedication to the National Targeting Center Counter Network Division in 2017.” At his going-away party, his boss even cited his work on the leak investigation, Rambo told investigators.
He still has his job at CBP, but not the accolades. And it hasn’t been easy going at his coffee shop either. In late September, he arrived one morning and found a photo of himself plastered to a telephone pole outside, identifying him as a Border Patrol agent. It called him a racist who tried to blackmail a journalist. Some posters had a QR code that linked to a list of articles about Rambo. The posters were also plastered around the neighborhood, which he blames on the press coverage of his role in the Wolfe investigation.
A poster identifying Rambo as a CBP agent on a telephone pole in Barrio Logan; a portion of a poster that has been ripped down. (Jana Winter/Yahoo News)
More than four years after he met with Watkins, Rambo agreed to sit down with a Yahoo News journalist at a cocktail bar in San Diego to tell his story. He agreed to speak, he said, because of the threats to him and his shop. He also wants people to know he’s been cleared by CBP — something the agency has authorized him to disclose — and is hoping to offset the bad news stories.
He’s angry at lots of people. At the press for vilifying him, and CBP for not publicly defending him, and the FBI for its “poor handling” of the case. “They never would have had a case pertaining to Ali Watkins or James Wolfe or any other people that may or may not be involved in this matter if that information wasn’t provided to them by me,” he says.
The news stories follow him everywhere. Recently, he had a date planned with a woman, but she canceled after reading articles about him. In the meantime, Dan White, Rambo’s onetime boss, is back at the Counter Network Division, supervising the same team as before. When the inspector general requested any new policies or procedures the division had for contacts with journalists and people outside government, it received no reply.
Rambo is convinced the whole story will clear him.
Sitting with a Yahoo News reporter at the bar, not far from his coffee shop, Rambo was sipping his WhistlePig old fashioned, talking about the most recent threats, when two women sitting across the bar recognized him from the fliers around Barrio Logan, the ones that called him a “fed” and “a rat,” and said he tried to blackmail a journalist and make her an FBI informant.
"How did you not see this would be a problem?" said one of the women, referring to his opening a coffee shop in Barrio Logan.
As with everyone else, Rambo was convinced that if he told them his side of the story, he could win them over.
“Ask me anything,” he said, buying their next round of drinks.
For two hours, until the bar closed, Rambo spoke to the women about his job and his presence in Barrio Logan.
“Jeffrey Rambo the coffee shop owner is different than Jeffrey Rambo, Border Patrol agent,” he told them. “That’s just my day job.”
Rambo in his coffee shop on Nov. 21. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)
Yet a few hours later, after the bar closed, Jeffrey Rambo, whether a border agent or coffee shop owner, was tearing down posters of himself around his neighborhood in San Diego. He wanted CBP and the police to come take fingerprints, to identify who put up the posters (they declined). “CBP said this is a private matter, but that’s bullshit,” he said. “In this neighborhood, being identified as law enforcement is dangerous.”
The man who investigated a journalist and her sources now feels wronged by the media, which investigated him, and frustrated that he can’t marshal the resources of the government to investigate his critics.
Rambo knows that speaking to a journalist about his case will likely get him fired from his government job, but CBP’s refusal to defend him has led him, as he put it, “to take matters into my own hands.”
“What none of these articles identify me as, is a law enforcement officer who was cleared of wrongdoing, who actually had a true purpose to be doing what I was doing,” he said, “and CBP refuses to acknowledge that, refuses to admit that, refuses to make that wrong right.”
14. Diplomacy Alone Can’t Save Democracy
Excerpts:
Diplomacy is “a critical ingredient in the mix of tools that can have a beneficial effect,” Norman Eisen, the former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic and a co-author of the Brookings report, told me. But ultimately, “the fight against illiberalism, the battle for democracy, has to be led and won by the people and the political leaders of a nation.”
...
Laying the groundwork to save democracy is a lofty goal for any summit, much less an online one spanning two days. But whether Biden’s will be remembered as a net positive will ultimately hinge on whether it can yield tangible commitments. The best proof of concept would be for the U.S. to return to next year’s follow-up having taken the necessary steps to strengthen American democracy and prevent the constitutional crisis of 2020 from repeating itself. But this summit isn’t likely to galvanize U.S. lawmakers to take this matter seriously any more than it is to compel leaders elsewhere to act. Democratization begins at home.
Diplomacy Alone Can’t Save Democracy
Domestic actors, not global summits, drive democratization.
As a candidate, Biden pledged to make renewing democracy a cornerstone of his foreign policy, in part by bringing together leaders and representatives from the world’s democracies to address authoritarianism, fight corruption, and promote human rights. By the end of the summit, which wraps up today, participating governments are expected to make commitments to shore up democracy at home and abroad. The status of those pledges is set to be reviewed at a follow-up gathering next year.
Reversing democracy’s global decline is a tall order for what is effectively a think-tank exercise. The summit faces some glaring obstacles, including the questionable sincerity of its more illiberal participants and America’s weakened credibility on the topic at hand. Perhaps the most fundamental challenge is the question of whether diplomacy can meaningfully achieve what Biden has set out to do.
Of the more than 100 countries invited to participate in the summit, the majority represent strong democracies. But the guest list also features many leaders who are responsible for driving the democratic backsliding that prompted the summit in the first place, including India’s Narendra Modi, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. Together, they’re in charge of some of the countries that have seen the steepest democratic decline. Indeed, more than a quarter of the countries on the summit’s roster were deemed only “partly free” in the democracy watchdog Freedom House’s latest “Freedom in the World” report. Three invitees (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Iraq) are not considered free at all.
In deciding which countries would be included in the summit, the Biden administration sought to ensure that “a diverse slate of democracies” was represented, a State Department spokesperson told me. A more cynical reading of the guest list would be that the U.S. invited a number of countries too important to snub but where democracy is on the decline, such as India and Poland.
Irrespective of which countries are involved in the summit or how highly they rank on the democratic scale, preventing and reversing global democratic erosion will not be easy for diplomacy to tackle on its own. Democratization is a process that usually takes place within countries, not among them. Some of the gravest threats to democracy are internal: distrust, polarization, voter suppression, and partisan institutions. Diplomatic pressure can encourage and promote more democratic practices, but it is not what drives democracy forward.
Domestic actors and movements play the biggest role in defending—or destroying—democracy. And for good reason: The foundations of healthy democracies, including voting access and civil liberties, are largely domestic matters. Poor access to public services, rising inequality, and declining material prosperity can also lead to democratic decline, experts have warned. “Direct players,” including the political establishment, civil society, the press, and the private sector, are most responsible for protecting democracy, according to the Brookings Institution’s Democracy Playbook, a set of 10 recommendations the think tank updated this week ahead of the summit. Foreign governments’ and international institutions’ role in promoting democracy is largely limited to supporting civil society and, where applicable, making financial aid and trade contingent on democratic outcomes. Although diplomacy can complement domestic efforts, it’s not a sufficient replacement for “a powerful and genuinely domestic movement to hold public figures and institutions accountable to democratic rules and principles,” the Brookings report notes.
Diplomacy is “a critical ingredient in the mix of tools that can have a beneficial effect,” Norman Eisen, the former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic and a co-author of the Brookings report, told me. But ultimately, “the fight against illiberalism, the battle for democracy, has to be led and won by the people and the political leaders of a nation.”
In some ways, Biden’s summit takes this reality into account. By encouraging participating countries to propose their own targets, and by involving activists, journalists, and other members of civil society in the discussion, he is effectively encouraging countries to bear the brunt of the work themselves. This allows leaders to tailor their pledges to their own country’s needs, but also prevents the U.S. from being seen as dictating how other democracies should act—something that would unlikely be appreciated coming from a country with its own backsliding problem. The United States’ questionable authority on this subject isn’t lost on the Biden administration, which is approaching the summit from a “position of humility,” a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday. Within the past year alone, 19 U.S. states have enacted laws making it more difficult for Americans to vote. The fight to install partisan loyalists in key election posts ahead of future elections is already being waged across the country.
“We have this archaic Electoral College; we’ve got this system that’s increasingly gerrymandered so that members of Congress can basically choose their own voters instead of the other way around; we have a system that empowers a minority party to act like a majority party, and that is being more deeply entrenched,” Matt Duss, Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign-policy adviser, told me. “If we’re talking about protecting and preserving democracy, there’s a very real question of what have we actually been doing here at home to protect our own?”
Another challenge for the summit is the overarching narrative that the democracy crisis is inherently geopolitical and rooted in a contest between the world’s democracies and authoritarian states, rather than an internal conflict within democracies themselves. By fixating on the former, and the threats posed by maligned external actors, democracies risk overlooking more insidious threats that reside within, in the form of growing polarization, inequality, and distrust in the idea that democracy can deliver for people’s needs.
“The threats to democracy are much less from the autocracies than the ability of democracies to make our systems work,” Bruce Jentleson, a public-policy and political-science professor at Duke University and a former foreign-policy adviser to the Obama and Clinton administrations, told me, noting that although external threats such as disinformation campaigns are real, “the receptivity to that is because our systems aren’t working.” While Russia and China would no doubt cheer future efforts to subvert U.S. democracy, they can’t cause any more damage than Americans have already proved willing to cause themselves.
Laying the groundwork to save democracy is a lofty goal for any summit, much less an online one spanning two days. But whether Biden’s will be remembered as a net positive will ultimately hinge on whether it can yield tangible commitments. The best proof of concept would be for the U.S. to return to next year’s follow-up having taken the necessary steps to strengthen American democracy and prevent the constitutional crisis of 2020 from repeating itself. But this summit isn’t likely to galvanize U.S. lawmakers to take this matter seriously any more than it is to compel leaders elsewhere to act. Democratization begins at home.
This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.
15. What Special Operations Command's 'Biggest Lesson' from Afghanistan Means for Future Fights
My thought: Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it. Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities.
Excerpts:
Perhaps one of the most important nuggets of information from Clarke in November was about how SOCOM conducts foreign internal defense -- the training and advising of local forces -- and how it may approach that mission in the future.
After nearly two decades conducting that mission on behalf of Iraqi and Afghan counterparts -- at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives -- forces in both countries have faltered or failed against determined adversaries.
The approach U.S. forces took to that mission in those countries shouldn't be the default going forward, Clark said last month.
"We don't necessarily need to train with partner forces for what we want them to do. We need to train for partner forces of what they need to do for their country and their environment. I think that's the biggest lesson that we have to take from this, writ large," Clarke told military reporters at the conference.
What Special Operations Command's 'Biggest Lesson' from Afghanistan Means for Future Fights
military.com · by 10 Dec 2021 Business Insider | By Stavros Atlamazoglou · December 10, 2021
The hectic last days of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan spelled an end of an era for the U.S. special-operations community.
For the past two decades, U.S. special operators have been at the forefront of the fight against global terrorism. In addition to Afghanistan, American commandos deployed -- and, in some cases, are still deploying -- to Iraq and Syria and parts of Africa and Southeast Asia to combat terrorist groups.
U.S. Special Operations Command is following the Pentagon's shift to great-power competition against near-peer competitors, such as China and Russia, but elusive and persistent jihadists still threaten security and stability around the world.
That means U.S. special operators face two completely different opponents. Although those challenges have common elements, SOCOM will have to use two different playbooks to counter them.
The Fight Against Terrorism Continues
Even before the fall of the Afghan government and the chaos of the Taliban takeover -- which could lead to a resurgence of al-Qaida or other terrorist organizations -- SOCOM's leader emphasized that counterterrorism remains the U.S. special-operations community's priority.
In testimony to Congress in April, Gen. Richard Clarke, the commander of SOCOM, highlighted that his force has the capabilities and tools to address both violent extremist organizations and Russia and China.
Clarke also said that there has been a drawdown in the deployment of special-operations forces abroad, with 2020 being the year with the fewest commandos abroad since 2001.
The SOCOM commander told lawmakers that about 40% of U.S. special operators focus on near-peer adversaries, with the rest fighting terrorists. Clarke said the command is looking to balance that division of labor equally, showing that while the Pentagon pivots to near-peer warfare, the U.S. special-operations community still has to deal with terrorism.
Despite being battered by the U.S. military and intelligence community for more than 20 years, al-Qaida and its many offshoots are still present and seeking to strike American and Western targets.
Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is particularly dangerous. Other VEOs, such as ISIS and Al-Shabaab, also pose a considerable threat.
In comments at the Military Reporters and Editors Association conference in November, Clarke acknowledged that the threat of terrorism remains active.
Clarke said SOCOM has started a review from its operations in Afghanistan to inform the special-operations community's future approach to violent extremist organizations. He suggested the review's focus will be on how U.S. commandos supported larger conventional forces.
"We got to take those lessons learned, and where applicable to conditions somewhere else, we have to be able to apply those," Clarke said at the conference.
One Mission, Two Lessons
Perhaps one of the most important nuggets of information from Clarke in November was about how SOCOM conducts foreign internal defense -- the training and advising of local forces -- and how it may approach that mission in the future.
After nearly two decades conducting that mission on behalf of Iraqi and Afghan counterparts -- at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives -- forces in both countries have faltered or failed against determined adversaries.
The approach U.S. forces took to that mission in those countries shouldn't be the default going forward, Clark said last month.
"We don't necessarily need to train with partner forces for what we want them to do. We need to train for partner forces of what they need to do for their country and their environment. I think that's the biggest lesson that we have to take from this, writ large," Clarke told military reporters at the conference.
What that means in practical terms is that U.S. special operators may have different curricula for foreign internal defense, depending on the "customer."
The inherent flexibility of U.S. special-operations units would allow them to teach different aspects of the same mission set to two audiences in ways suited for each audience.
The future will be packed with challenges for the US special-operations community, but it has shown over the past 40 years that it has a versatile toolkit to address current and emerging threats.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
military.com · by 10 Dec 2021 Business Insider | By Stavros Atlamazoglou · December 10, 2021
16. Meet the Special Forces task force featured on the Army uniforms
Although Army lost yesterday, it was still a great gesture for the Army to honor the Special Forces Regiment.
Meet the Special Forces task force featured on the Army uniforms
When the towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001, the country was plunged into a war — a war that until its abrupt end this August was considered “the forever war.”
While there were multiple joint special operations task forces established during Operation Enduring Freedom, Task Force Dagger was the first, with members deploying as early as Oct. 19, 2001.
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Elements of the task force came from the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, Air Force Special Tactics Teams and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division.
Their goal was to partner with Afghan warlords and fighters from the Northern Alliance to wipe out Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The Army Green Beret teams involved in the mission, known as Operational Detachment Alphas, included ODAs 534, 555, 574 and 595.
The ODA numbers can be found on the shoulders of this year’s jerseys. Army Special Forces’ Latin motto, “De Oppresso Liber,” or “To free the oppressed,” is also printed on the front of the jerseys.
Special Operations Forces teams, Operational Detachment Alphas, are featured on the shoulders of the 2021 Army uniforms. (Army)
ODAs 555 and 595 were the first two elements to enter the country after the attacks, with ODA 595 supporting anti-Taliban efforts in the Panjshir Valley, while ODA 555 worked to defeat Taliban forces near Bagram.
The members of ODA 595 have also famously been nicknamed the “Horse Soldiers,” after they commandeered horses in order to navigate the mountainous terrain on their way to helping Afghan citizens reclaim the city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
ODA 534 partnered with elements of the Northern Alliance and Afghan Gen. Atta Muhammad Nur, providing them with air support and direct lines of fire.
ODA 574 was tasked with escorting Hamid Karzai, who was intended to lead the governing body of the country after the fall of the Taliban. The team ultimately won the Battle of Tarin Kowt with Karzai loyalists and were key in the U.S. and Afghan forces later retaking Kandahar.
“If there was any fear that we had, it was that we would be worthy of the American people… the people of New York, people of Washington, the people of Pennsylvania, the people of our great country and all those… who lost people on that day,” commander of Task Force Dagger, Lt. Gen. John Mulholland, said of their mission on a West Point website. “So that was with us constantly, the fear that we would not be worthy of the American people.”
Although the ODAs as a whole are the main focus of this year’s uniforms, also highlighted is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
Nicknamed the “Nightstalkers,” the 160th SOAR is the premier rotary wing for Army Special Forces. In 2001, the regiment was responsible for transporting the ODAs from Karshi-Khanabad Airbase in Uzbekistan to their various insertion points in Northern Afghanistan, flying MH-47E ‘Chinook’ helicopters and modified CH-47s.
Their unit patch is featured on the team’s helmets, along with the date of the 2001 attacks.
More than 300 members of the Army’s Special Operations Command — to include enablers like members of female Civil Support Teams and PsyOps — died in their country’s service since 2001.
Note: Travel accommodations for Army Navy Game coverage by Military Times were provided by USAA, a military-focused insurance company.
Rachel is a Marine Corps veteran, Penn State alumna and Master's candidate at New York University for Business and Economic Reporting.
17. What I told the students of Princeton by Abigail Shrier
A thoughtful and thought provoking essay.
What I told the students of Princeton
Show some self-respect and reclaim your freedom
I was so honored tonight to be hosted by the Princeton Tory, the Witherspoon Institute and the Tikvah Fund. The undergraduates I met tonight were clear sighted and brilliant and astonishingly well read. There’s so much on their shoulders. Here was my message to them.
The question I get most often—the thing that most interviewers want to know, even when they’re pretending to care about more high-minded things—is: What’s it like to be so hated? I can only assume that’s what some of you rubberneckers want to know as well: What’s it like to be on a GLAAD black list? What’s it like to have top ACLU lawyers come out in favor of banning your book? What’s it like to have prestigious institutions disavow you as an alum? What’s it like to lose the favor of the fancy people who once claimed you as their own?
So, perhaps I’ll begin by telling you a little bit about myself mainly because I’m not so different from many of you. I grew up, daughter of two Maryland State judges, in a multi-racial suburb in Prince George’s County, Maryland. I attended a community Jewish day school, which I loved. In high school, I worked as a stringer for the Washington Jewish Week and edited my school paper. I attended Columbia University, where I received the Kellett Fellowship for two years of graduate study at Oxford. From there, I earned my J.D. from Yale Law School and then clerked for a Clinton-appointee on the D.C. Circuit.
At the beginning of my clerkship, I accepted a setup with a guy from Los Angeles, and by the end of that year, had decided to follow my then-boyfriend to California. I took a job with a terribly prestigious LA firm, whose daily tasks nearly anesthetized me. I married my boyfriend, struggled to hold onto pregnancies, quit law firm life and had three children. I taught them to read and sang them songs very badly and wrote a series of unpublishable novels. Most people who’d known me before wondered what the hell I was doing.
I began writing a few op-eds for our local Jewish paper, one of which was spotted by a Wall Street Journal editor, who invited me to submit to the Wall Street Journal. I did, and in the course of that year, published 13 op-eds with the Journal. One of those op-eds inspired a reader to contact me and tell me the story of her teen daughter who was rushing into a sudden gender transition. After trying and failing to find an investigative journalist who wanted the assignment, I took it on myself. My investigations turned into a book called Irreversible Damage.
All of which is to say: I’m not a provocateur. I don’t get a rush from making people angry. You don’t have to be a troll to find yourself in the center of controversy. You need only be two things: effective, and unwilling to back down.
Why am I unwilling to back down? Why wouldn’t I prostrate myself before the petulant mobs who insist that my standard journalistic investigation into a medical mystery—specifically, why so many teen girls were suddenly identifying as transgender and clamoring to alter their bodies—makes me a hater? Why on earth would I have chosen to write this book in the first place and am I glad that I wrote it?
You don’t have to be a troll to find yourself in the center of controversy. You need only be two things: effective and unwilling to back down.
If you’re here, you no doubt are familiar with at least some of the unpleasantness you encounter whenever you deviate from the approved script. So, again, what’s it like to be the target of so much hate? It’s freeing. That’s what I’d like to talk about tonight.
As an undergraduate studying philosophy, I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering whether my will was free. This is the metaphysical question of whether anyone can be said to have acted ‘freely.’ And most of the philosophers seemed to agree that our will wasn’t all that free. The hard determinists painted a world in which every human action was ultimately explicable by the wave function of elementary particles, ultimately leading neurons to fire—setting off of axonal conduction well beyond our control and none of which we directed.
Even if you weren’t a hard determinist, you struggled with the obvious problem that human decisions – and the reasons behind them – are structured by one’s upbringing, experience or even inborn personality traits, all of which shape our motivations. Compatibilists claimed that, at most, one could hope to live according to one’s own motives and preferences. That is, motives and preferences that were largely determined by things like personality.
“The Actions of man are never free,” 18th Century determinist Baron Holbach once wrote. “They are always the necessary consequence of his temperament, of the received ideas, and of the notions, either true or false, which he has formed to himself of happiness, of his opinions, strengthened by example, by education, and by daily experience.”
I remember reading those lines as an undergraduate, tugged by the worry that Holbach was right: maybe our motivations were determined by our personalities and upbringing and received ideas. Today, I read them and think: if only.
In 2021, it seems a luxury to worry that a will determined and shaped entirely by received ideas and our own personality-driven desires might not be entirely free. Today, before any of us decides what it is we want, we open our phones and participate in our own manipulation at the hands of those who actively want us to think, and see, and vote differently than our own wills would have us do. If we were not entirely free before, in other words—we are far less so now.
Every dating app pushes us toward the same few attractive mate choices; Spotify presses us to like the same music; Amazon pushes us to purchase specific books and away from others. If you’re under the impression that the books Amazon recommends to you are based solely on a content-neutral algorithm, I can disabuse you of that fiction right now. I once asked one of my sources at Amazon, who was concerned about the ways the search results were being manipulated, whether he’d ever seen a book deliberately boosted. Yes, he said. Becoming by Michelle Obama. When that book came out – he told me – virtually every search you did led to the recommendation to buy the former First Lady’s book. And the opposite is also true. There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is.
But the larger point is, your will is being toyed with, subverted, manipulated. And in a fairly insidious manner. None of you will be shocked to hear that Google promotes certain search results in order to lead us to a certain perspective. But did you know that, for contested entries, Wikipedia assigns editors, some of whom are ideologically committed activists, many of whom have very particular views they want you to walk away with.
If you form views based on those Wikipedia articles or reports by corrupt fact-checkers, if you act based on them, are you exercising freedom of will? Given that you’ve been spun and prodded along to a pre-determined conclusion by hidden persuaders, perhaps you aren’t. Perhaps you’re left in the same sorry state as the Moor of Venice: toyed with, subverted, manipulated. Acting out someone else’s plan, pointed in the direction that he wants you to walk.
We’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years debating whether this kind of manipulation is at the root of our political divisions, but I don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to an even more basic question: how it has interfered with freedom of conscience and ultimately free will.
When polled, nearly two out of three Americans (62%) say they are afraid to express an unpopular opinion. That doesn’t sound like a free people in a free country. We are, each day, force-fed falsehoods we are all expected to take seriously, on pain of forfeiting esteem and professional opportunity:
“Some men have periods and get pregnant.” “Hard work and objectivity are hallmarks of whiteness.” “Only a child knows her own true gender.” “Transwomen don’t have an unfair advantage when playing girls’ sports.”
On that final example of a lie, the one about transwomen in girls’ sports, I want you to think for a moment about a young woman here at Princeton. She’s a magnificent athlete named Ellie Marquardt, an all-American swimmer who set an Ivy League record in the 500-meter freestyle event as a freshman. Just before Thanksgiving, Ellie was defeated in the 500-meter, the event she held the record in, by almost 14 seconds by a 22 year old biological male at Penn who was competing on the men’s team as recently as November of 2019. That male athlete now holds multiple U.S. records in women’s swimming, erasing the hard work of so many of our best female athletes, and making a mockery of the rights women fought for generations to achieve.
Ellie Marquart swam her heart out for Princeton. When will Princeton fight for her? Where are the student protests to say—enough is enough. When a biological male who has enjoyed the full benefits of male puberty—larger cardiovascular system, 40% more upper body muscle mass, more fast-twitch muscle fiber, more oxygenated blood—decides after three seasons on the men’s team to compete as a woman and smashes the records of the top female swimmers in this country, that is not valor—that’s vandalism.
Where is the outrage? Imagine, for a second, what it must be like to be a female swimmer at Princeton, knowing you must pretend that this is fair—that the NCAA competition is anything other than a joke. Imagine being told to bite your tongue as men lecture you that you just need to swim harder. “Be grateful for your silver medals, ladies, and maybe work harder next time,” is the message. Imagine what that level of repression does to warp the soul.
Now, imagine, instead, the women’s swimmers had all walked out. Imagine they had stood together and said: We will meet any competitor head on. But we will not grant this travesty the honor of our participation. We did not spend our childhoods setting our alarm clocks for 4am every morning, training for hours before and after school, to lend our good names to this fixed fight.
“Be grateful for your silver medals, ladies, and maybe work harder next time,” is the message. Imagine what that level of repression does to warp the soul.
I know why students keep their heads down. They are hoping for that Goldman or New York Times internship, which they don’t want to put in jeopardy. Well, any institution that takes our brightest, most capable young people—Princeton graduates!—and tells you can only work here if you think like we tell you to and keep your mouth shut, that isn’t really Goldman Sachs and it isn’t the paper of record. It’s the husk of a once-great institution, and it’s not worth grasping for. Talk to alums at these institutions: they sound like those living under communist regimes. That’s the America that awaits you if you will not speak up.
You who are studying at one of the greatest academic institutions in the country only to be told that after graduation, you must think as we tell you and recite from this script—why were you born? What’s the point of being alive? Computers are vastly better at number crunching. They’ll soon be better at all kinds of more complex tasks. What they cannot do is stand on principle. What a computer cannot do is refuse to lend credibility to a rigged competition—to refuse to strengthen its coercion—making it that much harder for the next female athlete to speak up. What the computer cannot know is the glorious exertion of the human will when it refuses to truckle in the face of lies and instead publicly speaks the truth.
Machines will soon be better than humans at all kinds of complex tasks. What they cannot do is stand on principle.
I didn’t write Irreversible Damage to be provocative. In a freer world, nothing in my book would have created controversy. I wrote the book because I knew it was truthful and I believed recording what I found—that there was a social contagion leading many teenage girls to irreversible damage—was the right thing to do. I also believe if I hadn’t written it, thousands more girls would be caught up in an identity movement that was not organic to them but would nonetheless lead them to profound self-harm. But I didn’t write it specifically to stop them. I wrote it simply because it was true.
When I testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee back in March, I started by stating that I am proud to live in an America where gay and transgender Americans live with less stigma and fear than at any point in American history. That is the glory of freedom as well—the chance for adults to live authentic lives and guide their own destinies. And allowing mature adults to make those sorts of choices for themselves is absolutely a requirement of a free society. Yes, you can reject the false, dogmatic insistences of Gender Ideology and still wish to see transgender Americans prosper and flourish and fulfill their dreams in America. I do.
I wrote the book because the story of one mom and her teen daughter compelled me, and so did that of the dozens of other parents who then spoke to me—mothers and fathers who sobbed as they described how their daughters had become caught up in a craze that seemed completely inauthentic to the child, but which they were powerless to arrest.
I wrote the book not because I believed the fancy institutions I’d attended would celebrate me, or even acknowledge me, after I had done so. I wrote it because I knew that the point of all the educational opportunities I received that my equally-qualified grandmothers never had, the purpose of all the sacrifices my parents had made for my education—for all the time my teachers and professors had taken with me—couldn’t be to plod through life on a forced march. The point of all the hours my parents and teachers and mentors had devoted to me, was surely not to become the world’s best-oiled automaton. The point of all of that privilege—and yes, I think that was a kind of privilege—was to be able to write and think as others lacked the will to do.
Spotify employees tried to hold that company hostage because they carried my podcast episode with Joe Rogan. Amazon employees threatened to quit if they continued to carry my book. GoFundMe shut down a grass-roots fundraiser by parents, who reached into their own pockets, to advertise my book. And the ACLU threw its entire, century-old mission in the garbage, all because of one book with which it disagreed. Joining these petulant mobs is not a show of strength, and it is not freedom. It’s closer to servitude.
I wrote Irreversible Damage because I knew the point of all the educational opportunities I received—opportunities my equally-qualified grandmothers never had—couldn’t be to plod through life as a well-oiled automaton.
True, if you dare exercise your will, you may sit for decades on the Supreme Court, as the eldest member, the only African American, perform your duties admirably and with integrity, and perhaps not a single elementary school in America will bear your name. Does anyone doubt this is a discredit to his detractors—not to Justice Thomas?
I cannot claim to know if we are truly free in the metaphysical sense. But if the universe is anything less than thoroughly determined down to the last sub-atomic particle, then we must also agree that freedom admits of degrees. And if that is true, then we are far less free today in this decade—that you, as undergrads, have lost a significant measure of freedom that your parents once had. Take it back. Take it back. It’s yours to demand. Take back the right to speak your mind—thoughtfully, courteously, with a goal in mind beyond giving offense. The list of unmentionable truths expands so rapidly, without reason other than the attempt to suffocate a free people so that they forget the exhilaration of a lungful of air.
If you are someone who believes you have pronouns or would like to supply them, by all means, that is your prerogative. Whenever anyone asks me to use their preferred pronouns, and I can do so without confusing my audience or muddying an argument, I do so and I think this is an important courtesy. But –when asked, I will not state my pronouns and if you don’t believe in Gender Ideology, you shouldn’t either. When you state your pronouns, you participate in the catechism of Gender Ideology – the belief that there are ineffable genders, unknowable to all but the subject. That no one can possibly know I am a woman unless I’ve supplied these. I do not believe this. I regard this as nonsense. When asked for my pronouns, I say: “I am a woman.” Take back your freedom. Reclaim it now.
Psychiatrists and pediatricians tell me they are afraid to resist an adolescent’s demand that she be given puberty blockers because they’re afraid—if they point out the risks or the hastiness of the decision—they will lose their licenses. Parents tell me they are afraid to push back on the activist teachers and social workers at their kids’ school for fear of being called some flavor of phobe. Whatever freedom is—it isn’t that—and all of the wonderful education you have earned here will have been wasted if you find yourself one day observing some lie predominating in your own field and the best you can do is sit on the phone with me anonymously lamenting the state of things. You will soon be graduates of Princeton. Show some self-respect and reclaim your freedom.
It isn’t in those moments when you do just what’s expected that your will is tested. It isn’t in those moments when you recite the script that you exceed what any computer can achieve. Those moments when you managed to make yourself a faceless member of a pre-approved chorus will slide away as though you were never part of them.
The wonderful education you have earned here will have been wasted if you find yourself one day observing some lie predominating in your own field, and the best you can do is sit on the phone with me anonymously lamenting the state of things.
You will, each of you, have the chance to matter. You will find yourselves at hospitals or in banks or in courtrooms and at newspapers where you will see things happen that you know to be wrong—where you find that the standard line is actually a lie. You may have found yourself there already. If you’re fortunate enough, you may even find yourself one day with children of your own, knowing you are their best defense in this world. And you’ll feel the nub of your will, pressing you to do something—say something. And when that happens, don’t sit there like a sock puppet.
I’m 43, which I realize makes me very old to many of you. But not so long from now, you’ll wake up and be 43 yourselves. And when I look back on my life thus far, it occurs to me that the decisions of which I am most proud—the ones that strike like an unexpected kiss—are not the times when I obeyed the algorithm. They’re the times when I defied it and felt, for a moment, the magic and power of being alive. When I felt, even for an instant, the exquisite joy of not being anyone’s subject. When I had the unmistakable sense that I’ve existed for a purpose, that I stood the chance of leaving the world better than I found it. You don’t get any of that through lock-step career achievement and you certainly don’t get that by being the Left’s star pupil.
You feel that frisson when you choose a person to commit yourself to knowing full well that any marriage may fail; when you bring children into a world where there are no guarantees of their safety or success. When you summon the courage to fashion a life, something that will remain after you are gone. When you speak the truth publicly—with care and lucidity. And when you say to the world: you cannot buy me with flattery. Purchase my colleagues or classmates at bulk rate. I am not for sale.
Thank you.
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.
