Chris Hedges's Blog, page 231

The Thought Police Are Coming

Chris Hedges gave this talk Tuesday, June 11, at an event held in London in support of Julian Assange.

Ask the Iraqi parents of Sabiha Hamed Salih, aged 15, and Ashwaq Hamed Salih, aged 16, who were killed by shrapnel in Baghdad on July 31, 2004, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the man and his two young daughters who saw their wife and mother shot to death and were themselves wounded in a car fired upon by U.S. Marines in Fallujah on July 22, 2005, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the parents of Huda Haleem, an 18-year-old girl, and Raghad Muhamad Haleem, a 5-year-old boy, shot dead by U.S. soldiers on June 2, 2006, in Iraq’s Diyala province what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the parents of the 15-year-old boy choked with a wire and then shot to death by U.S. Marines in Ramadi on Aug. 10, 2006, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the relatives of Ahmed Salam Mohammad, who was shot dead on Nov. 27, 2006, when U.S. troops attacked a wedding party near Mosul, an attack that also left four wounded, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the families of the over one dozen people shot to death with .50-caliber machine guns by bantering U.S. Apache helicopter crews in east Baghdad in July 2007—the crew members can be heard laughing at the “dead bastards” and saying “light ’em up” and “keep shooting, keep shooting”—a massacre that included two journalists for Reuters—Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh—what they think of Julian Assange. Ask the then 10-year-old Sajad Mutashar and his 5-year-old sister, Doaha, both wounded, whose 43-year-old father, Saleh, was shot to death from the air as he attempted to assist one of the wounded men in the Baghdad street what they think of Julian Assange.

There is nothing like the boot of the oppressor on your neck to give you moral clarity.

None of these war crimes, and hundreds more reported to the U.S. military but never investigated, would have been made public without Julian, Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks. That is the role of journalists—to give a voice to those who without us would have no voice, to hold the powerful to account, to give the forgotten and the demonized justice, to speak the truth.

We have watched over the last decade as freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government abuses and lies have been obliterated by wholesale government surveillance and the criminalizing of the leaking and, with Julian’s persecution, publication of these secrets. The press has been largely emasculated in the United States. The repeated use of the Espionage Act, especially under the Obama administration, to charge and sentence whistleblowers has shut down our ability to shine a light into the inner workings of power and empire. Governmental officials with a conscience, knowing all of their communications are monitored, captured and stored by intelligence agencies, are too frightened to reach out to reporters. The last line of defense lies with those with the skills that allow them to burrow into the records of the security and surveillance state and with the courage to make them public, such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond, now serving a 10-year prison term in the United States for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The price of resistance is high not only for them, but for those such as Julian willing to publish this information. As Sarah Harrison has pointed out: “This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.”

Even if Julian were odious, which he is not, even if he carried out a sexual offense, which he did not, even if he was a poor houseguest—a bizarre term for a man trapped in a small room for nearly seven years under house arrest—which he was not, it would make no difference. Julian is not being persecuted for his vices. He is being persecuted for his virtues.

His arrest eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities carried by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments in the seizure of Julian two months ago from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power, no matter what their nationality, will be hunted down around the globe and seized, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where journalism is outlawed and replaced with propaganda, trivia, entertainment and indoctrination to make us hate those demonized by the state as our enemies.

The arrest of Julian marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism and constant state surveillance, now far advanced in China, that will soon define our lives. The destruction of all protection of the rule of law, which is what we are witnessing, is essential to establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state.

The BBC China correspondent Stephen McDonell was locked out of WeChat in China a few days ago after posting photos of the candlelight vigil in Hong Kong marking 30 years since student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were gunned down by Chinese soldiers in June 1989.

“Chinese friends started asking on WeChat what the event was?” he wrote. “Why were people gathering? Where was it? That such questions were coming from young professionals here shows the extent to which knowledge of Tiananmen 1989 has been made to disappear in China. I answered a few of them, rather cryptically, then suddenly I was locked out of WeChat.”

In order to get back on WeChat he had to agree that he was responsible for spreading “malicious rumors” and provide what is called a faceprint.

“I was instructed to hold my phone up—to ‘face front camera straight on’—looking directly at the image of a human head. Then told to ‘Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese.’ My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face.”

Governmental abuse of WeChat, he wrote, “could deliver to the Communist Party a life map of pretty much everybody in this country, citizens and foreigners alike. Capturing the face and voice image of everyone who was suspended for mentioning the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary in recent days would be considered very useful for those who want to monitor anyone who might potentially cause problems.”

This is almost certainly our future, and it is a future that Julian has fought courageously to prevent.

In another sign the noose is tightening, the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., the country’s national broadcaster, were raided by federal police last Wednesday. The raid was carried out because the broadcaster had disclosed detailed accounts of Australian special forces in Afghanistan killing unarmed people, including children. That story was generated, in part, by a leak of hundreds of classified military documents. The police raid and search through raw footage and thousands of files, emails and internal documents appear to be part of a hunt for the source, who will, no doubt, be arrested and imprisoned.

Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to arrest a nationalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Julian, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did Donald Trump demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States?

The psychological torture of Julian—documented by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and ill treatment, Nils Melzer—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of the novel “1984.” It is said the Gestapo broke bones and the East German Stasi secret police broke souls. Today, we too have refined the cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. This is why Julian, his physical and psychological health in serious decline, has been moved to a prison hospital. We can all be taken to George Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to be made compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures”—and you can be sure there are American intelligence operatives here assisting the British in the psychological torture of Julian—have destroyed thousands of detainees in black sites around the globe. These techniques, including prolonged solitary confinement, are the staple form of control in maximum-security prisons in the United States, where the corporate state makes war on its most oppressed and politically astute underclass—African Americans.

There has been a coordinated smear campaign against Julian by our Thought Police, one that is amplified by the very media organizations that published WikiLeaks material. The campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called for eradicating the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroying Julian’s reputation.

This character assassination was championed by the Democratic Party establishment after WikiLeaks published 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs provided to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, should have remained hidden, that the public did not have a right to know, but they can’t then call themselves journalists.

WikiLeaks has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections. It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save Snowden from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow after he made public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence agencies. The Snowden leaks also revealed that Julian was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”

We must build popular movements to force the British government to halt the extradition and judicial lynching of Julian. We must build popular movements to force the Australian government to intervene on behalf of Julian. We must build popular movements to reclaim democracy and the rule of law. If Julian is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Donald Trump has attacked as “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging of the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the profits of corporations and consolidate the global oligarchs’ total grip on power will no longer be part of public debate. First Julian. Then us.

The Generals Won’t Save Us From the Next War

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on The American Conservative.

Poll after poll indicates that the only public institution Americans still trust is the military. Not Congress, not the presidency, not the Supreme Court, the church, or the media. Just the American war machine.

But perhaps that faith in the U.S. Armed Forces is misplaced. I got to thinking about this recently after I wrote articles calling for dissent among military leaders in order to stop what seems to be a likely forthcoming war with Iran. While I still believe that dissent in the ranks stands the best chance of galvanizing an apathetic public against an ill-advised, immoral conflict in the Persian Gulf, I also know its a pipe dream.

These are company men, after all, obedient servants dedicated—no matter how much they protest otherwise—to career and promotion, as much or more than they are to the national interest. The American military, especially at the senior ranks, is apt to let you down whenever courage or moral fortitude is needed most. In nearly 18 years of post-9/11 forever war, not a single general has resigned in specific opposition to what many of them knew to be unwinnable, unethical conflicts. Writing about the not-so-long-ago Vietnam War, former national security advisor H.R. McMaster, himself a problematic war on terror general, labeled in his book title such military acquiescence Dereliction of Duty. That it was, but so is the lack of moral courage and logical reasoning among McMaster and his peers who have submissively waged these endless wars in Americans’ name.

Think on it: of the some 18 general officers who have commanded the ill-fated, ongoing war in Afghanistan, each has optimistically promised not only that victory was possible, but that it was “around the corner” or a “light at the end of the tunnel.” All these generals needed, naturally, was more time and, of course, more resources. For the most part they’ve gotten it, billions in cash to throw away and thousands of American soldiers’ lives to waste.

Why should any sentient citizen believe that these commanders’ former subordinates—a new crop of ambitious generals—will step forward now and oppose a disastrous future war with the Islamic Republic? Don’t believe it! Senior military leaders will salute, about-face, and execute unethical and unnecessary combat with Iran or whomever else (think Venezuela) Trump’s war hawks, such as John Bolton, decide needs a little regime changing.

Need proof that even the most highly lauded generals will sheepishly obey the next absurd march to war? Join me in a brief trip down an ever so depressing memory lane. Let us begin with my distinguished West Point graduation speaker, Air Force General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers. He goes down in history as as a Donald Rumsfeld lackey because it turns out he knew full well that there were “holes” in the Bush team’s inaccurate intelligence used to justify the disastrous Iraq war. Yet we heard not a peep from Myers, who kept his mouth shut and retired with full four-star honors.

Then, when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki accurately (and somewhat courageously) predicted in 2003 that an occupation of Iraq would require up to half a million U.S. troops, he was quietly retired. Rummy passed over a whole generation of active officers to pull a known sycophant, General Peter Schoomaker, out of retirement to do Bush the Younger’s bidding. It worked too. Schoomaker, despite his highly touted special forces experience, never threw his stars on the table and called BS on a losing strategy even as it killed his soldiers by the hundreds and then the thousands. Having heard him (unimpressively) speak at West Point in 2005, I still can’t decide whether he lacked the intellect to do so or the conscience. Maybe both.

After Bush landed a fighter plane on a carrier and triumphantly announced “mission accomplished” in Iraq, poor Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the newest three-star in the Army, took over the hard part of conquest: bringing the “natives” to heel. He utterly failed, being too reliant on what he knew—Cold War armored combat—and too ambitious to yell “stop!”  Soon after, it came to light that Sanchez had bungled the investigation—or coverup (take your pick)—of the massive abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison.

General John Abizaid was one of the most disappointing in a long line of subservient generals. It seems Abizaid knew better: he knew the Iraq war couldn’t be won, that it was best to hand over control to the Iraqis posthaste, that General David Petraeus’s magical “surge” snake oil wouldn’t work. Still, Abizaid didn’t quit and retired quietly. He’s now Trump’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, which is far from comforting.

Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster was heralded as an outside-the-box thinker. And indeed, he was a Gulf War I hero, earned a Ph.D., taught history at West Point, and wrote a (mostly) well-received book on Vietnam. Yet when Trump appointed him national security advisor, he brought only in-the-box military beliefs with him into the White House. He then helped author a fanciful National Defense Strategy that argued the U.S. military must be ready at a moment’s notice to fight Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and “terror.” Perhaps at the same time! No nuance, no diplomatic alternatives, no cost-benefit analysis, just standard militarism. These days, McMaster is running around decrying what he calls a “defeatist narrative” and arguing for indefinite war in the Middle East.

Then there was the other Washington insider and “liberal” favorite, one of a trio of “adults in the room,” General Jim Mattis. Though sold to the public as a “warrior monk,” Mattis offered no alternative to America’s failing forever wars. In fact, when he decided his conscience no longer allowed him to stay in the Trump administration, his reason for leaving was that the president had called for a reduction of troops in Afghanistan after 18 senseless years. U.S.-supported Saudi terror bombings that killed tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians? A U.S.-backed Saudi blockade that starved at least 85,000 Yemeni children to death? Yeah, he was fine with that. But a modest troop withdrawal from a losing 18-year-old war in landlocked Central Asia, that he couldn’t countenance.

Then there’s the propensity for politics and pageantry among senior military officers. This was embarrassingly and unconscionably on display in the tragic cases of Private First Class Jessica Lynch and Corporal Pat Tillman. When, during the initial invasion of Iraq, the young Lynch’s maintenance convoy got lost, she was captured and briefly detained by Saddam’s army. Knowing a good public relations opportunity when they saw it, Bush’s staff and the generals concocted a slew of comforting lies: Lynch was a hero who had fought to her last bullet (she’d never fired her rifle), she’d been tortured (she hadn’t), her combat-camera equipped commando rescue had come just in the nick of time (she was hardly guarded and in a hospital). Who cares if it was all lies, if this young woman’s terrifying experience was co-opted and embellished? The Lynch story was media fodder.

More tragic was the Pat Tillman escapade. Tillman was an admirable outlier, the only professional athlete to give up a million dollar contract to enlist in the military soon after 9/11. Tillman and his brother went all in, too, choosing the elite Army Rangers. It was quite the story. Rumsfeld even wrote the new private a congratulatory letter. Then reality got in the way. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan during a friendly fire incident that can only be described as gross incompetence. Almost immediately, President Bush’s staff and much of the Army’s top brass went to work crafting the big lie: a heroic narrative of Tillman’s demise, replete with dozens of marauding Taliban fighters and a one-man charge befitting the hard-hitting former NFL defensive back. Promoted to corporal posthumously, he was awarded the Silver Star. Some of his fellow Rangers were instructed to lie to the Tillman family at the memorial service regarding the manner of Pat’s death.

Only Bush’s neophytes and the Army’s complicit generals didn’t count on the tenacity of Tillman’s parents. They waged something nearing war with the U.S. military for several years until they found out the truth, unearthing a coverup that implicated Bush’s civilians and many of the military’s four-star generals (including Stanley McChrystal, John Abizaid, and Richard Myers). The Tillman family got their congressional hearing, but the sycophantic representatives on the Hill refused to seriously criticize the top brass and no one was seriously punished.

It turns out, by the way, that Tillman was much more intriguing in real life than the generals’ concocted tale. Far from some ubiquitous jock, he was a genuine thinker with immense intellectual curiosity. And he was antiwar, at least when it came to Iraq. He told a close buddy in his squad that “this war is just so fucking illegal” and even maintained a correspondence with Noam Chomsky. That the military would use and abuse this gifted, principled man as a tool to sell an illegal war ought to have at last dispelled any delusions of general officer duty or ethics.

Then there’s what I’ve seen at (admittedly) the most micro level. I’ve generally worked for majors and colonels more interested in pleasing their “bosses” and earning promotions than fighting off ill-advised missions and protecting their precious troops. I’ve buried more brave young men than I wish to count. Some of my commanders were driven by ambition; some could barely spell Afghanistan. Most were promoted anyway. It is they who will be obediently leading the next war when it comes…in Iran.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major and regular contributor to The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, the LA Times, The Nation, Tom Dispatch, The Huffington Post, Truthdig, and The Hill. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He co-hosts the progressive veterans’ podcast “Fortress on a Hill.” Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet.

News Hounds Ignore Red Meat in D.C., Gnaw on Bone in New York

Monday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing was just getting underway when the first reports came in: New York. Aircraft. Building.

Since 2001, any aircraft-vs.-building incident in New York is big news. So it was that mass media coverage of a helicopter crash-landing threw shade on the Democrats’ first salvo in an as-yet undeclared impeachment war.

The chopper incident, big story though it was for jittery New York, had none of the historical import of the Washington hearing, billed by the Democrats as the start of an education campaign for the American people. It was titled “Lessons from the Mueller Report: Presidential Obstruction and Other Crimes.”

Call it impeachment light.

When it became clear the Manhattan incident was not much more than a disturbing echo of 9/11, we kept waiting for at least one of the big 3 cable networks to switch coverage to Capitol Hill. None did.

Instead it was “game on” for the ultracompetitive media. Historical import be damned, we’re going to cover the New York story like a wet blanket.

Meanwhile, as broadcast on C-SPAN, the committee was hearing compelling testimony from former U.S. attorneys Joyce White Vance and Barbara McQuade, who lucidly explained why a presidential attempt to obstruct justice, if unpunished, undermines the rule of law in America.

“By seeking to curtail the [Russia] investigation,” McQuade declared, “President Trump committed an act that threatened the national security of this country.”

Related Articles











Democrats in House Leadership Rebel Against Pelosi on Impeachment



by Ilana Novick

















Why Are Democrats So Scared of Impeachment?



by Bill Blum











GOP Congressman Who Calls for Impeachment Stands Alone



by

“I would be personally willing to indict this case and try this case,” Vance said.

The hearing’s star witness, John Dean, was less effective but weathered a storm of contempt from Republicans on the committee who gladly reminded him of his 45-year-old crimes in helping cover up for Richard Nixon in Watergate.

Too bad that so few people got to see them in action, but that was just the beginning. Monday’s event was the first of three high-profile “Lessons from the Mueller Report” hearings this week. Trump, Russian interference, obstruction of justice … stay tuned for much more of Mueller 101. Even if the only place you can find it is on C-SPAN.

 

Mexico Denies Trump’s Claim of Secret Concessions in Deal

STERLING, Va. — Three days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a deal with Mexico to stem the flow of migrants at the southern border, the two countries appear unable to agree on exactly what’s in it.

Stung by criticism that the agreement mostly ramps up border protection efforts already underway, Trump on Monday hinted at other, secret agreements he says will soon be revealed.

“We have fully signed and documented another very important part of the Immigration and Security deal with Mexico, one that the U.S. has been asking about getting for many years,” Trump wrote Monday, saying it would “be revealed in the not too distant future.”

Related Articles











Trump's Threatened Tariffs on Hold After Deal With Mexico



by

















Deal or No Deal, Asylum Seekers Wait It Out at the Southern Border



by

Not so, said Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, holding up a paper and pointing to the previously announced details. He told reporters the two countries agreed on two actions made public Friday and said if those measures didn’t work to slow migration, they would discuss further options.

“There is no other thing beyond what I have just explained,” he said.

The episode revealed the complicated political dynamics at play as Trump and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador tussle over who made out best in the agreement hashed out under Trump’s threat of new tariffs on Mexico. Trump appeared eager to declare his negotiation tactics successful, even as he tried to hype the deal with made-for-TV drama and invented measures, sparking questions and confusion. Mexico’s leaders showed they weren’t willing to play along.

The White House did not respond to inquiries about Trump’s tweets.

But the president appeared to be making a reference to talks over how Mexico handles Central American migrants who travel through the country to claim asylum in the U.S.

The Trump administration has been trying to pressure Mexico to enter into a “safe third country” agreement, which would deem Mexico a safe place for migrants and make it harder for asylum seekers who pass through the country to wait until they reach American soil to file a claim.

But the deal announced Friday made no mention of the issue.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to share details of closed-door talks, said Mexico had expressed openness to the idea during negotiations, and said the two countries would continue to discuss the issue over the coming months.

Mexico has been insistent that it has not agreed to the provision, which would require approval from local lawmakers.

Instead, Ebrard said during a press conference in Mexico City Monday, if the deal announced Friday does not begin to drive down migrant numbers in the next 45 days, officials will open up new discussions in which the U.S. will again push for the safe third country measure and Mexico will propose establishing a regional refuge system in conjunction with the United Nations and the governments of Guatemala, Panama and Brazil — three countries that are often starting points for migrants headed to the U.S.

“They wanted something else totally different … to be signed,” Ebrard said Monday. “But that is what there is here. There is no other thing.” As for Trump’s tweets hyping a secret measure? Ebrard said he’d provided a full account for transparency’s sake.

A regional asylum compact like the one Ebrard described could have major implications for asylum seekers, said Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

“While in theory such an agreement would share the burden of refugee flows across several countries, in reality it could significantly worsen the current situation if the designated countries are unable or unwilling to properly accept and integrate the migrants,” she said.

Over the weekend, Trump also claimed another new element of the deal, tweeting that Mexico had “AGREED TO IMMEDIATELY BEGIN BUYING LARGE QUANTITIES OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCT FROM OUR GREAT PATRIOT FARMERS!” The administration has yet to reveal the details of any such provision, and Mexican officials say no agreement on farm goods was reached as part of the talks.

Ebrard told reporters the talks had focused on migration, not commerce, and hypothesized that Trump was calculating an economic boost resulting from his decision not to implement the tariffs.

“We do not have a specific agreement on products of that nature,” he said.

Trump has spent the days since Friday’s announcement defending the scope of the deal.

That includes a commitment by Mexico to deploy its new National Guard to the country’s southern border with Guatemala — something the country already intended to do before Trump’s latest threat. It also includes an agreement to publicly support the expansion of a program under which some asylum seekers are returned to Mexico as they wait out their cases. U.S. officials had been working to expand the program, which has led to the return of about 11,000 to Mexico without Mexico’s public embrace.

Trump and other administration officials, however, say Mexico made major concessions and have credited his threat to slap a 5% tax on all Mexican goods if the country didn’t immediately agree to do more to stem the flow of Central American migrants across the U.S. southern border. Without the threat, Trump has insisted, Mexico never would have acted.

“It was all done because of the tariffs and because of the relationship that we have with Mexico,” he told reporters Monday, following a call-in interview with CNBC Monday morning in which he said officials had “talked about it for months and months and months,” but couldn’t reach agreement until the threat.

___

Verza reported from Mexico City.

Jared Kushner is Abusing His Office in ‘Plain Sight’

The latest scandal from the President Donald Trump administration involves secretive foreign investments in a company in which the president’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner has a stake.

As The Guardian reported Monday, real estate speculation corporation Cadre, which was co-founded by Kushner, has received at least $90 million in overseas capital since 2017.

“Corruption in plain sight!” tweeted journalist Rula Jebreal.

Corruption in plain sight!

A company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from unknown offshore investor.

The

This Is How War With Iran Is Manufactured

Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal was a top campaign priority for President Trump, one he accomplished in 2018. In a May 8 speech from the White House, he said the agreement was “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” He also claimed in a tweet the agreement increased Iran’s military budget, which CNN called misleading. When reporters from The Washington Post asked the source of the claim, the White House provided a Forbes article by an Iranian writer named Heshmat Alavi.

Alavi is described in his Forbes contributor biography as “an Iranian activist with a passion for equal rights.” His byline also appears in The Hill, The Daily Caller and The Federalist. The problem, however, is not only that President Trump may be using a misleading claim to support his decision to withdraw from an international nonproliferation agreement, but that the person who wrote about the claim may not exist, according to new reporting from The Intercept.

“Alavi’s persona,” Murtaza Hussain writes in The Intercept, “is a propaganda operation run by the Iranian opposition group Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is known by the initials MEK.”

Hassan Heyrani, a high-ranking defector from the MEK and one of Hussain’s sources, told The Intercept that Alavi’s persona is a group effort “run by a team of people from the political wing of the MEK,” who are based in Albania. According to Heyrani, the group writes under a pseudonym partly because MEK abhors individuality. As Heyrani told The Intercept, “… the leader is the first man in the organization, and everything should be under their shadow.”

MEK, Hussain explains, is “deeply unpopular” in Iran, and is now looking to English-speaking audiences in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. These are all places, Hussain writes, “whose foreign policies are crucial nodes in the MEK’s central goal of overthrowing the Iranian regime.”

Creating a writer persona isn’t the MEK’s only attempt at disinformation. Reza Sadeghi, a former MEK member now living in Canada, told The Intercept, “We were always active in making false news stories to spread to the foreign press and in Iran.” MEK also donated money to various politicians and paid them to make speeches favorable to MEK.

Concentrating its campaigns outside of Iran is part of MEK’s strategy. As Massoud Khodabandeh, a former member of MEK’s intelligence department, told The Intercept, “The group barely produces content in Farsi. They seem to have given up on having a domestic audience in Iran. Their point now is to influence people in the English-speaking world. … Their online strategy works in Washington; it doesn’t work in Tehran.”

Hussain elaborates:

The MEK conducts relentless online information campaigns, using an army of bots to flood online debates about Iran with the group’s perspective. One of the goals of the MEK team that manages the Hesmat Alavi account, Heyrani said, is to get articles under Alavi’s name published in the American press. The Intercept’s requests for comment to the MEK’s political wing, along with interview requests to the alleged operators of Alavi’s persona, went unanswered.

Alavi was a successful creation, particularly in Forbes, which published 61 articles with his byline between April 2017 and April 2018. Many of the articles combined denunciations of the current Iranian regime with suggestions that MEK’s leader should be the leader of Iran. According to The Intercept, none of the outlets that published Alavi’s byline were able to confirm that they ever spoke with him. The Daily Caller said it stopped publishing him due to quality concerns. Forbes said it ended the relationship in 2018.

Before MEK’s articles influenced U.S. policymaking, MEK was listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department, due to its violent history, a classification that was removed as part of the Iran deal.

Read the full report in The Intercept here.

Helicopter Crashes on Roof of NYC Skyscraper; Pilot Killed

NEW YORK — A helicopter crash-landed on the roof of a rain-shrouded midtown Manhattan skyscraper Monday, killing the pilot and briefly triggering memories of 9/11, though it appeared to be an accident.

The crash near Times Square and Trump Tower shook the 750-foot (229-meter) AXA Equitable building, sparked a fire on the roof and forced office workers to flee on elevators and down stairs, witnesses and officials said.

The pilot was believed to be the only one aboard, and there were no other reports of injuries, authorities said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the crash, or why the Agusta A109E was flying in a driving downpour with low cloud cover and in the tightly controlled airspace of midtown Manhattan. A flight restriction in effect since President Donald Trump took office bans aircraft from flying below 3,000 feet within a 1-mile radius of Trump Tower, which is less than a half-mile (0.8 kilometers) from the crash site.

The helicopter went down about 11 minutes after taking off from a heliport along the East River, a little more than a mile (1.6 km) away. Police Commissioner James O’Neill said it may have been returning to its home airport in Linden, New Jersey.

Pedro Rodriguez, a pastry line cook at Le Bernardin, a well-known restaurant in the building, said workers got an announcement telling everyone to exit, and he later heard from people around him that there was a fire on the roof.

The evacuation was not chaotic, Rodriguez said, but he was rattled because he immediately thought of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“It’s scary when something like this happens,” he said.

The crash happened shortly before 2 p.m., when clouds obscured the roof of the building. Rescue vehicles swarmed to the scene a few blocks from Rockefeller Center.

“If you’re a New Yorker, you have a level of PTSD, right, from 9/11. And I remember that morning all too well. So as soon as you hear an aircraft hit a building, I think my mind goes where every New Yorker’s mind goes,” said Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who spoke to reporters at the scene.

Videos posted by onlookers showed emergency vehicles in the street, but no obvious damage to the skyscraper. The fire department later tweeted a photo of the helicopter’s wreckage.

Working for a bank on the building’s seventh floor, Kendall Sawyer felt a shake — “jarring enough to notice,” but workers weren’t sure what it was, she said.

Then came an announcement that the situation was being looked into, and a few minutes later, an instruction to evacuate, without explanation, she said.

“It was a little bit crazy, a little bit scary” as workers walked down the stairs, she said.

A block south, lawyer Lance Koonce heard a loud sound he thought could be a low-flying helicopter. From his 21st-story window, he looked up and saw smoke.

“I couldn’t tell if the smoke preceded the helicopter coming over, or if it was from the helicopter crashing into the building,” he said.

Trump tweeted from Washington that he had been briefed on the crash and that his administration was ready to help if needed. Cuomo’s office said the president and governor had spoken.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the National Transportation Safety Board would oversee an investigation.

The city currently allows helicopters to take off and land from three heliports, one each on the East and West sides and in downtown Manhattan. All of the facilities border rivers.

It was once more common for helicopters to take off from private Manhattan rooftops, the most famous of which was on the tower then known as the Pan Am building. In 1977, four people waiting on the roof were killed when a helicopter toppled over and a rotor blade broke off and hit them. A fifth person, a pedestrian, was killed by falling debris.

That spurred a push to close down private helipads.

Still, the city has seen a string of helicopter accidents since. The most recent was just last month, when a copter crash landed in the Hudson River near a busy Manhattan heliport. The pilot escaped mostly unscathed.

Five people died when a sightseeing helicopter crashed into the East River last year. Three people died in another crash into the same river in 2011. A sightseeing helicopter collided with a small plane in 2009 and killed people not far from the scene of Monday’s mishap.

In 2006, New York Yankees pitcher Corey Lidle’s single-engine plane slammed into the 20th floor of a building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, killing Lidle and his flight instructor. It was not clear which one was piloting the plane.

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded the pilot misjudged a narrow U-turn before veering into the building.

___

Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak, Deepti Hajela, Tom McElroy, Kiley Armstrong and Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.

Google Is Making Billions at the Media’s Expense

Last year, amid a wave of layoffs and turmoil in the media that has shown no sign of breaking, Google earned $4.7 billion in revenue from news publishers through search and Google News—a figure that is likely conservative due to the multinational’s diverse business model. The findings were part of a study by the trade organization News Media Alliance, previously the Newspaper Association of America, and first reported in The New York Times.

“The actual value of news content to Google is more difficult to quantify because of the various ways the company uses news content to drive traffic, develop its products and entrench its dominant position,” the study reads. “In addition to using news content for product development, such as training its artificial intelligence services, Google is tailoring its products—ramping up its use of news—to keep users in the Google ecosystem.”

For a news industry that earned a total $5.1 billion in advertising in 2018, the dangers are manifest. Just ask Philadelphia Media Network CEO Terrance C.Z. Egger, whose company’s publications include The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and the erstwhile philly.com. “The study blatantly illustrates what we all know so clearly and so painfully,” Egger told the Times’ Marc Tracy. “The current dynamics in the relationships between the platforms and our industry are devastating.”

David Chavern, the News Media Alliance’s president and chief executive, offered a similar assessment: “[Google] makes money off this arrangement and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers.”

Chavern hopes this latest study will impel Congress to pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill sponsored by House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., and House Judiciary ranking member Doug Collins, R-Ga. According to the alliance, the legislation would “grant news publishers an antitrust safe harbor allowing them to come together to collectively negotiate with the tech platforms for more equitable terms.” The bill, which has the backing of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), National Newspaper Association (NNA), Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN) and dozens of state press associations, would allow also publishers to “withhold content during the negotiations.”

Google’s hefty profits at the news industry’s expense will likely renew calls in progressive circles to smash Big Tech. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has called for Facebook to be broken up, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced a proposal in March that would dismantle several Silicon Valley monopolies, including Google. “We must help America’s content creators — from local newspapers and national magazines to comedians and musicians — keep more of the value their content generates, rather than seeing it scooped up by companies like Google and Facebook,” she wrote at the time.

As the News Media Alliance makes clear, the future of the Fourth Estate may depend on it.

Read more at The New York Times.

Stern Words From Iran: U.S. Cannot ‘Expect to Stay Safe’

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s foreign minister warned the U.S. on Monday that it “cannot expect to stay safe” after launching what he described as an economic war against Tehran, taking a hard-line stance amid a visit by Germany’s top diplomat seeking to defuse tensions.

A stern-faced Mohammad Javad Zarif offered a series of threats over the ongoing tensions gripping the Persian Gulf. The crisis takes root in President Donald Trump’s decision over a year ago to withdraw America from Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Trump also reinstated tough sanctions on Iran, targeting its oil sector.

“Mr. Trump himself has announced that the U.S. has launched an economic war against Iran,” Zarif said. “The only solution for reducing tensions in this region is stopping that economic war.”

Related Articles











America's Sordid History of Meddling in Iran



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

















War With Iran Is America's Endgame



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

Zarif also warned: “Whoever starts a war with us will not be the one who finishes it.”

Zarif’s ramped up rhetoric marked a sharp departure for the U.S.-educated diplomat and signals that Iran is taking a harder line toward the West. His public threats, which came during a joint news conference with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, were striking because Zarif was the one who helped secure the nuclear deal, alongside the relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani. However, he does not make the decision on whether to go to war. That is left to the supreme leader.

For his part, Maas insisted his country and other European nations want to find a way to salvage the deal, which saw Iran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. But he acknowledged there were limits.

“We won’t be able to do miracles, but we are trying as best as we can to do prevent its failure,” Maas said.

However, Europe has yet to be able to offer Iran a way to get around the newly imposed U.S. sanctions. Meanwhile, a July 7 deadline — imposed by Iran — looms for Europe to find a way to save the unraveling deal.

Otherwise, Iran has warned it will resume enriching uranium closer to weapons-grade levels.

Zarif’s comments came after Maas spoke about Israel, an archenemy of Iran’s government.

“Israel’s right to exist is part of Germany’s founding principle and is completely non-negotiable,” Maas said. “It is a result of our history and it’s irrevocable and doesn’t just change because I am currently in Tehran.”

Zarif then grew visibly angry, offering a list of Mideast problems ranging from al-Qaida to the bombing of Yemeni civilians he blamed on the U.S. and its allies, namely Saudi Arabia.

“If one seeks to talk about instability in this region, those are the other parties who should be held responsible,” Zarif said.

Zarif’s sharp tone likely comes from Iran’s growing frustration with Europe, as well as the ever-tightening American sanctions targeting the country. Iran’s national currency, the rial, is currently trading at nearly 130,000 to $1. It had been 32,000 to the dollar at the time of the 2015 deal. That has wiped away people’s earnings, as well as driven up prices on nearly every good in the country.

European nations had pledged to create a mechanism called INSTEX, which would allow Iran to continue to trade for humanitarian goods despite American sanctions. However, that program has yet to really take off, something Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman noted before Zarif and Maas spoke to reporters.

“We haven’t put much hope in INSTEX,” spokesman Abbas Mousavi said, according to Iranian state television. “If INSTEX was going to help us, it would have done so already.”

Maas later met Rouhani as well.

“We expect Europe to stand up to the United States’ economic terrorism against the Iranian nation, living up to its commitments under the deal,” Rouhani told him, according to a statement.

Trump, in withdrawing from the deal, pointed that the accord had not limited Iran’s ballistic missile program, or addressed what American officials describe as Tehran’s malign influence across the wider Mideast.

Back when the deal was struck in 2015, it was described it as a building block toward further negotiations with Iran, whose Islamic government has had a tense relationship with America since the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and subsequent hostage crisis.

Some members of Trump’s administration, particularly National Security Adviser John Bolton, previously supported the overthrow of Iran’s government. Trump, however, has stressed that he wants to talk with Iran’s clerical rulers.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will arrive in Tehran on Wednesday as an interlocutor for Trump.

Japan had once purchased Iranian oil, but it has now stopped over American sanctions. However, Mideast oil remains crucial to Japan and recent threats from Iran to close off the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth through which a third of all oil traded by sea passes, has raised concerns.

The semi-official Tasnim news agency reported that Ali Asghar Zarean, deputy head of Iran’s nuclear department, said Tehran had increased the number of its centrifuges to 1,044 at the Fordo underground facility. That’s the maximum allowed under the deal.

Meanwhile, the head of the U.N. atomic watchdog said Monday that Iran had already increased its uranium enrichment activities. Iran previously announced it would quadruple its production of low-enrichment uranium.

“I am worried about increasing tensions over the Iranian nuclear issue,” Yukiya Amano of the International Atomic Energy Agency said. “As I have constantly emphasized, the nuclear-related commitments entered into by Iran under the (deal) represent a significant gain for nuclear verification — I therefore hope that ways can be found to reduce current tensions through dialogue.”

___

Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Karin Laub in Amman, Jordan, and David Rising in Berlin contributed to this report.

Justice Department Agrees to Release Key Mueller Evidence to Congress

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has agreed to turn over some of the underlying evidence from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, including files used to assess whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said Monday.

In the first breakthrough in weeks of negotiations over the report, Rep. Jerrold Nadler said the department will begin complying with the committee’s subpoena on Monday and provide some of Mueller’s “most important files.” He said all members of the committee will be able to view them.

The Justice Department did not have an immediate comment.

Related Articles











Mueller: Special Counsel Probe Did Not Exonerate Trump



by

In response to the agreement, Nadler said the panel will not vote to hold Attorney General William Barr in criminal contempt, for now. But the House is still expected to vote on a resolution Tuesday that would empower the committee to file a civil lawsuit for the materials, if Democrats decide to do so.

“We have agreed to allow the Department time to demonstrate compliance with this agreement,” Nadler said in a statement. “If the department proceeds in good faith and we are able to obtain everything that we need, then there will be no need to take further steps.”

The deal is unlikely to give Democrats all of what they were requesting — including an unredacted version of the report and secret grand jury testimony. But it is the first agreement that the Judiciary panel has been able to strike with the department since the report was issued in April.

The news comes hours before Democrats were to start a series of hearings intended to galvanize public attention on the findings of the Russia investigation. John Dean, a star witness from Watergate who helped bring down Richard Nixon’s presidency, is one of the witnesses. The hearing, which will also feature former U.S. attorneys, is on “presidential obstruction and other crimes.”

Dean, a White House counsel during Nixon’s administration, told CNN on Monday that he’ll describe “how strikingly like Watergate what we’re seeing now, as reported in the Mueller report, is.” He said he’ll pay particular attention to the question of whether Trump obstructed justice.

The slate of televised sessions on Mueller’s report means a new, intensified focus on the Russia probe and puts it on an investigative “path” — in the words of anti-impeachment Speaker Nancy Pelosi — that some Democrats hope leads to Trump’s impeachment. In doing so, they are trying to aim a spotlight on allegations that Trump sought to obstruct a federal investigation as well as his campaign’s contacts with Russia in the 2016 election.

And they will lay the groundwork for an appearance from Mueller himself, despite his stated desire to avoid testifying.

Monday’s hearing is the start of three days of Russia-related action on Capitol Hill. The House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday intends to review the counterintelligence implications of the Russian meddling. Mueller said there was not enough evidence to establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but he said he could not exonerate Trump on obstruction.

On Tuesday, the House has scheduled the vote to authorize civil contempt cases against Barr and former White House counsel Donald McGahn for failing to comply with subpoenas from the Democratic-controlled House. The vote will put the full House on record approving the lawsuits, if leaders and committees decide they want to move forward with them.

Barr had defied a subpoena to provide an unredacted version of Mueller’s report, along with underlying evidence. McGahn, who is frequently referenced in the report, has defied subpoenas to provide documents and testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

Language in the resolution also would make it easier for committee chairmen to take the Trump administration to court. The chairmen could take legal action to enforce subpoenas in the future without a vote of the full House, so long as the chairmen have approval from a five-person, bipartisan group where Democrats have the majority.

With Trump pledging that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Democratic leaders want to avoid repeated floor votes on contempt resolutions that would detract from their legislative agenda.

The procession of hearings and votes in the week ahead is partly designed to mollify anxious Democrats who have pushed Pelosi, D-Calif., to begin impeachment proceedings immediately . Pelosi has rejected that option, preferring a slower, more methodical approach to investigating the president, including the court fights and hearings.

During a meeting with Nadler and other committee heads last week, Pelosi made the case that she would rather see Trump voted out of office and “in prison” than merely impeached, according to a report in Politico. A person familiar with the exchange confirmed the account to The Associated Press.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of a handful of members who pleaded with Pelosi last month to start an inquiry, said the votes and hearings are going to be enough, for now, as they wait to see what happens in court.

“I am very satisfied that things are moving in the right direction,” Raskin said. “And I think the American people are getting increasingly educated and engaged about the lawlessness of the president.”

Educating the American public on what is in the Mueller report is a priority for Democrats, who believe Trump and his allies have created the public impression that the report said there was no obstruction of justice. Trump has made that assertion repeatedly, echoing Barr’s judgment that there was not enough evidence in the report to support a criminal obstruction charge. Mueller said in the report that he could not exonerate Trump on that point.

The special counsel did not find evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia. But the report details multiple contacts between the two.

Republicans are poised to defend the president at the hearings and challenge Democrats on the decision not to open impeachment hearings.

Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, sent Nadler a letter Friday calling the upcoming hearing a “mock impeachment hearing” and warning Democrats to be civil when speaking of the president.

Collins said in the letter that outside of impeachment proceedings, “it is out of order for a member of Congress, in debate, to engage in personalities with the president or express an opinion, even a third party opinion, accusing the president of a crime. The rules are clear on this point.”