Chris Hedges's Blog, page 235

Ava DuVernay’s Searing Portrait of the Central Park Five

It has been more than 30 years since a rape and attempted murder occurred in New York City that became known as the Central Park Jogger case. The crime itself was indescribably vicious; the miscarriage of justice that followed—with five African American and Latino boys who became known as the Central Park Five framed for the crime and sent to prison—remains a blight on the criminal justice system. The five boys spent years behind bars, losing their youth in the process. Eventually, their convictions were vacated after the actual perpetrator confessed in jail. His confession was supported by irrefutable DNA evidence. When the teens were first arrested, Donald Trump, then a New York real estate developer, actively campaigned for the death penalty for the young defendants, taking out full-page ads in all of New York City’s major newspapers. To this day, ignoring all evidence, President Trump maintains that they are guilty.

These injustices have been poignantly captured in a damning, four-part Netflix miniseries called “When They See Us,” directed and co-written by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Ava DuVernay. With this vivid and dramatic work, DuVernay starkly portrays systemic racism that remains all too familiar today.

DuVernay’s telling of the tale focuses on the boys and their experiences. On the night of April 19, 1989, Trisha Meili, a white investment banker in her late 20s, went for a jog in Central Park. She was brutally attacked, raped and left for dead. Later that night, the New York Police Department arrested the five teens, interrogated them for hours upon hours without parents or lawyers present, and eventually charged them with the crime.

The five teens were Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. Only two of them knew each other at the time of their arrest. As Ava DuVernay told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour: “The Central Park Five … was a political moniker. It was something that was given to them by the press, given to them by the prosecution. It allowed them to be seen as a gang, as a ‘wolf pack,’ and not as Yusef, Korey, Kevin, Antron and Raymond—real people, real boys, with real families, memories, hopes, dreams, that were dashed the day that they were captured at a park.”

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DuVernay spends significant time depicting how intensely the five boys were pressured by police to obtain coerced confessions. “This is about the criminal justice system,” DuVernay said on “Democracy Now!” “Each part of the series, or the four-part film, as I call it, is designed to take you deeper and deeper, to make you further acquainted with different aspects of the system as it stands today.”

Linda Fairstein was head of the sex crimes unit at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. She is perhaps most known as the bestselling author of crime novels. In “When They See Us,” Fairstein, played by Felicity Huffman, is shown directing the coercion and attempting to block any due process for the powerless youths. After the series premiered on May 31, students at Vassar College, Fairstein’s alma mater, organized a petition drive that forced her to resign from the college’s Board of Trustees.

While Fairstein was in charge of coercing confessions, the real rapist, Matias Reyes, was still on the loose. He had beaten and begun raping a woman in Central Park on April 17, two days before Meili’s assault. That first victim gave the NYPD a description of him, saying he had stitches on his chin. A local hospital then gave the police the name, Matias Reyes, as someone who fit that description. The police never followed up on the lead. After the five boys were arrested, Reyes went on to beat and rape five women, murdering one of them, Lourdes Gonzalez, a pregnant mother of three.

One of us [Amy Goodman] lived in the same building where Matias Reyes was eventually captured. Her neighbor, his last rape victim, ran down the stairs screaming as he fled. The building doorman tackled him and held him until police arrived. Reyes confessed to several of his crimes, including the murder. Had Fairstein and the NYPD investigated the crimes, in which Reyes had repeated his M.O. again and again, rather than racially profiling and framing the five teens, perhaps those rapes, and the murder of that young mother, might have been prevented.

Korey Wise, the oldest of the five, was tried as an adult. After spending 11 years in prison, during which he was repeatedly beaten and brutalized in prison after prison, he met fellow prisoner Matias Reyes. Reyes confessed that he had raped Meili, and that he had acted alone. Wise served his time, nevertheless, as the others had as well, and was released. A New York State Supreme Court judge vacated all their convictions. The five sued the city and won a settlement of $41 million.

Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us” is essential viewing. It shows, as she says, “the system’s not broken; the system was built this way.”

The GOP’s White Supremacy Now Has a Smoking Gun

The United States Supreme Court is expected to rule shortly in the case of Department of Commerce v. New York — a critical legal battle over the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. census. The Trump administration and Republican Party have pushed hard on the idea of collecting citizenship information from U.S. residents, claiming the move is not intended to be harmful and that it simply represents a bid to return the census to an earlier status quo. In fact, proponents have gone as far as to claim that such information would help enforce protections for minority voters under the Voting Rights Act.

If Republicans have their way, the 2020 census will ask, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” with four different “yes” options and a single option saying, “No, not a U.S. Citizen.” Sounds harmless enough—if there were a relationship of trust between undocumented immigrants and the U.S. government. Although there are laws prohibiting census responses from being shared with law enforcement or immigration authorities, critics have countered that asking about citizenship will lead to fear among undocumented people who may refuse to fill out the form and thus be unaccounted for in the results and underrepresented in Congress. If that was the Republicans’ intent all along, a smoking gun has now emerged confirming those fears.

Here’s the backstory: A longtime Republican operative named Thomas Hofeller, now deceased, was hired by a major GOP donor to study the impact of drawing congressional district lines based not on the number of residents, but on the number of voting-age citizens living in those districts. Every person living in the United States currently has the constitutional right to be represented in Congress, whether or not they are eligible to vote. Hofeller’s 2015 study, which focused on the state of Texas, concluded that districts based on voting-age citizens would be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” and that one way to achieve this change would be to include a citizenship question on the census.

What’s remarkable is that the push for the 2020 citizenship question traces its roots to a high-level Republican operative who carried great influence within the GOP. The New York Times described Hofeller as the “Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.”

The documents exposing Hofeller’s recommendation for rigging the census to benefit whites and Republicans were unearthed as part of a separate lawsuit on gerrymandering in which the pro-democracy organization Common Cause is involved. Dan Vicuña, the national redistricting manager of Common Cause, explained to me in an interview that the case “demonstrates that this administration is not interested in a fully funded, effective, correct census. What it’s trying to do is rig elections.”

It is imperative to spell out Hofeller’s  — and by extension the Republican Party’s — intentions as white supremacist. To elevate the voting power of white Americans over non-white Americans while using minority voters’ rights as a foil is despicably racist. If you put this effort into the broader Republican-led assault on voting rights of people of color, voter purges, racial gerrymandering and nativist assaults on immigrants, among other overt and covert campaigns, a clear picture emerges of just how seriously the GOP bases its power on white supremacy.

The lawsuit challenging the addition of the citizenship question is only days away from being ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court. As soon as the new evidence came to light, the ACLU moved quickly to file a document asking the court to consider it. But with oral arguments being submitted in April, it is likely justices already have written their opinions, and the Justice Department — which under the leadership of Attorney General William Barr has become more politicized and partisan than ever — has vehemently opposed the introduction of the Hofeller evidence. In a document filing, the DOJ wrote, “The motion borders on frivolous, and appears to be an attempt to reopen the evidence in this already-closed case and to drag this Court into Plaintiffs’ eleventh-hour campaign to improperly derail the Supreme Court’s resolution of the government’s appeal.”

While it seems only fair that Hofeller’s damning words about the GOP’s intentions should figure into their decision-making, it may be too late given that the conservatives on the court appear inclined to side with the Trump administration. And there too, Republicans have ensured they have the upper hand, having essentially stacked the courts with right-wing partisan justices like Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh after the GOP-led Senate denied President Obama the chance to fill an open positions for months before the 2016 election.

Meanwhile, civil rights groups representing Latino and Asian communities also appealed to a federal judge to rethink his lower court ruling in light of the new evidence. U.S. District Judge George Hazel had earlier ruled against adding the citizenship question to the census but also maintained that, “Plaintiffs failed to show that the addition of the citizenship question was motivated by invidious racial discrimination.” Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which is one of the groups that is appealing, said, “Because the evidence strongly demonstrates an unlawful and discriminatory motive, the question must be removed, regardless of what the Supreme Court may conclude as to the separate claims before it.”

Whether or not judges accept the evidence, the racism of the citizenship question should at least be apparent to the American public — if only mainstream media outlets covered the story with the gravity it deserves. But many outlets did not dare to mention the white supremacist aspect of the Hofeller documents in their headlines. For example, NPR’s story was headlined, “GOP Redistricting Strategist Played Role In Push For Census Citizenship Question,” while The New York Times wrote, “Deceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship Question.” These vague pronouncements obscure the racist notions that drive the present-day Republican Party, an institution that birthed the Trump presidency in all its racist glory and continues to enable it.

Vicuña explained that “there’s a reluctance to call something racism or systemic bigotry without that smoking gun of a racial epithet or some sort of insult.” He stressed the importance of viewing issues such as this one through the lens of systems rather than individuals. After all, Hofeller may have been the individual originator of an insidious idea, but it has taken the effort of many others — including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Attorney General Barr and of course President Trump — to attempt to make the citizenship question on the census a reality. Their collective actions will have a major impact on whole communities around the nation.

Unless the Supreme Court does the right thing and rules against it, the only opposition that the GOP’s white supremacist project now faces is from some congressional Democrats. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings in April demanded documents from the Trump administration related to its decision-making on the citizenship issue. Typically, the Trump officials have stonewalled the request and now Ross and Barr face a vote of contempt of Congress by Thursday. In a strongly worded letter to them, Cummings said, “Unfortunately, your actions are part of a pattern. The Trump administration has been engaged in one of the most unprecedented cover-ups since Watergate, extending from the White House to multiple federal agencies and departments of the government and across numerous investigations.” He pulled no punches in referring to the newly unearthed Hofeller documents showing the Trump administration’s intention “to gerrymander congressional districts in overtly racist, partisan and unconstitutional ways.” But we are finding out that in Trump’s America, even congressional authority is severely limited.

A new study by the Urban Institute on the U.S. census estimates there would be “a total population net undercount of 1.22%” as a result of the citizenship question. That amounts to nearly 4 million people who are disproportionately Latino, or immigrant, or related to immigrants who will likely be undercounted in the 2020 census. In fact, the Urban Institute fears that the damage is already done, saying in its study, “Even if the citizenship question is not included on the 2020 census, we know from U.S. Census Bureau researchers that there is an increased climate of fear and hesitation to participate among Hispanic/Latinx and immigrant residents, which makes this estimate plausible either way.”

And perhaps that was Trump and the GOP’s goal all along — to foment so much fear in immigrant communities and communities of color that even the mere possibility of a question about citizenship status was enough. Actually, winning the inclusion of the question would be icing on their racist cake.

 

Watch Kolhatkar’s “Rising Up With Sonali” interview about the GOP’s strategy for the 2020 census below:

America Refuses to Fix Its Broken Election System

As 2020’s elections edge closer, recent troubling developments are casting new light on an old question—what will it take for the results to be trusted?

The emergence of powerful forms of online political propaganda, the absence of progress in 2019 state legislatures on improving audits and recounts, and new revelations about the extent of Russian hacking in 2016—accessing more election administration details than previously reported—all point to the same bottom line: what evidence can be presented to a polarized electorate to legitimize the results?

To be fair, some policy experts who network with senior election officials—who have authority to order more thorough vote-verification steps without new legislation—say there is still time to act. But as 2020 gets closer, there are fewer opportunities to do so.

The question of what additional proactive steps could be a public trust counterweight is not theoretical. There are many signs that 2020 will be very fractious, starting with the emergence of new forms of political propaganda. The latest is doctored videos, such as one recently of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—slurring her words—that drew millions of views, or another video mocking ex-Vice President Joe Biden after announcing his candidacy that President Trump tweeted. An emerging norm, where seeing is not necessarily believable, underscores the need for vote count evidence trails.

The latest revelations about Russian hacking in 2016 concern different issues, but point to a similar conclusion: that, arguably, more could or should be done at the process’s finish line to legitimize outcomes. In Florida, however, the full impact of Russian meddling has not been investigated by state or federal officials, according to Ion Sancho, who recently retired after nearly three decades as Supervisor of Elections in Leon County, where Tallahassee is located.

Russian hacking is back in the news, in part, because it poses questions about 2020 readiness. The Mueller report said that election administration computers in “at least one Florida county government” had been hacked, and the FBI later said that two unnamed counties had been breached. The accessed data included all the Election Day logistics, from poll workers to payrolls, as well as voter registration data, Sancho said.

“To me, all this says is at the front end, we fail, and we cannot presume to know that any mitigation has been successful, which puts the onus on auditing [the reported results],” Sancho said. “The issue is Florida is not protected because we do not verify our totals on the machines through any kind of an audit that is reliable.”

“This Russian intervention should push all election officials to say, ‘We’ve got to audit now,’” he continued. “We’ve got to verify that those… votes are correct and assume that there could be something that happened at the front end, so now you need to ensure the process [is legitimate]—by making sure that the paper ballots are properly audited. That’s the only solution I can see.”

Legislative Action or Inaction

To be fair, many states and counties have been collaborating with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to block hackers. Those efforts have been followed by statements that voting infrastructure is better protected than ever, and the “No. 1 threat is around public confidence in the process,” as DHS’s top election expert Matt Masterson has said.

While there have been no government disclosures of successful hacks after 2016’s breaches, election officials say that voting systems are routinely targeted. Stepping back, however, it’s notable that cybersecurity has commanded more attention than other steps that could boost public assurance that election results will be accurate—or more aggressively double-checked.

In many states, 2019’s legislative sessions are now over. Odd-numbered years are when states fine-tune election laws and protocols—as it is between federal cycles and there is time to implement changes. However, 2019 has seen scant legislation to make counting votes more transparent and rigorous, especially in swing states.

The National Conference of State Legislatures’ online database listed 44 recount-related bills in 2019 from 15 states. Hawaii, which had 14 proposed bills, passed a bill requiring a mandatory recount if the margin was less than 0.25 percent, but other bills requiring that recounts be done by hand have not moved. Virginia passed a bill requiring new “standards and instructions” if there is more than one recount in play. New York has a recount bill, but it too is stalled.

On the audit front, the NCSL database lists 55 bills from 21 states. Most are pending, which means their fate is uncertain when legislatures reconvene. Of the few that passed, such as in Georgia and in Indiana, there are different timetables when the new laws are to take effect. Georgia is after the 2020 election. Indiana is before the 2020 election, although state election officials can exempt counties.

What passed in these two states merits scrutiny. It is an audit whose goal is not to verify the unofficial election night results to the greatest extent possible—to try to account for every vote in the closest contests. It is a different objective and methodology, a statistical estimate of the tabulation’s overall accuracy called a “risk-limiting audit.”

In contrast, a 2019 bill backed by the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections to let counties use digital images of paper ballots to conduct more thorough recounts failed. Its opponents included Republicans (no House co-sponsors), activists who oppose using computers in vote counting, and some officials seeking less work, Sancho said.

Conversely, 2019 also saw several states pass voting-related bills intended to tilt the electorate for perceived partisan advantage.

Florida, again, offers several examples. Republicans have received wide press attention for a bill aimed at blocking 1.4 million ex-felons from expediently restoring their voting rights, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would sign. The bill requires former non-violent felons pay court fines. Critics have said the fees were akin to a poll tax.

That wide-ranging bill has other features that could alter who votes in 2020. Like many states, Florida has growing numbers of people voting by mail. The bill pushes back the window for absentee voting, which blunts impulsive last-minute voters. (That change gives officials a little more up-front time to process the ballots, its defenders said.)

The legislation also gives counties two days to fix problems with validating signatures on the mail-in ballot envelopes. In red rural counties, two days is enough time for officials to knock on affected voters’ doors, said Sancho. But in blue urban counties, where officials contact voters by postcards, he said that timetable was intentionally insufficient.

Another electorate-shaping bill passed in Texas. In that increasingly purple state, the bill would make it harder for Libertarian candidates to get on the ballot—critics say to keep voters in the GOP camp, while, conversely, making it easier for Greens to run—to dilute Democratic votes. That’s done through ballot qualification thresholds.

Meanwhile, there’s other backsliding. John Brakey, a voting transparency advocate who has been assessing North Carolina’s landscape, recently learned that election officials in the state’s most populated county do not want to install paper ballot-based voting systems before 2020—as had been expected. The officials are more comfortable with decade-old paperless technology, Brakey said, even if it cannot be independently audited.

“They don’t have the money” to buy new machines, he said. “They hope to extend the deadline. DREs [direct-recording electronic machines] are outlawed on December 31. They would rather deal with the devil they know. Even if they get money, it’s unlikely they would be ready for primary time next March.”

What to Do If 2020 Is Contested?

These examples raise troubling questions. How can such a polarized country believe the election results will be legitimate if vote counts are not more thoroughly and openly verified? And, should the presidential election be disputed, what then? Two nationally known legal scholars recently noted that Congress is currently incapable of resolving a disputed presidential result.

“No neutral referee presently exists,” wrote Ned Foley, a professor of law at Ohio State University who led the drafting of the American Law Institute principles for resolving any ballot counting disputes, and Michael McConnell, a professor of law at Stanford University and an ex-federal appellate judge, in the Hill.

“The Constitution gives Congress the role of declaring the winner of the presidential election. But Congress, being bicameral, cannot perform this important role if the Senate insists that Donald Trump won, while the House is equally adamant that the Democratic candidate did,” they wrote. “Congress, being ever more partisan, stands institutionally incapable of resolving an election contest in a way that supporters of the losing party will view as legitimate. The closer it gets to Inauguration Day, the more precarious this kind of stalemate becomes.”

The scholars proposed that Speaker Pelosi and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell each pick a person, and those two individuals pick a third member of a to-be-formed committee to serve as a “neutral referee.”

“This approach, modeled after private sector arbitration, is the simplest method for finding an umpire whom both sides can accept as fair,” they argued. “But whatever method of selection Pelosi and McConnell prefer, their chosen umpire should be ready before counting ballots begins. They should also pledge to accept the findings of the neutral arbiter unless both agree otherwise, a commitment that maintains the bipartisanship of their arrangement.”

Rarely have legal scholars suggested that a remedy outside the Constitution might be needed before a presidential election. But their view fits with the volatile 2020 landscape that is emerging. There’s a lack of vote count evidence trails and transparent audits to serve as a counterweight to the newest forms of propaganda. And Congress is not poised to handle the power struggle if the presidential result is contested.

The clock has not run out with taking proactive steps before 2020, but it is ticking, and opportunities to act are ebbing away while new worries are emerging.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

America’s Sordid History of Meddling in Iran

This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.

No war yet! That’s the good news…for now. A few weeks have passed since unhinged national security adviser John Bolton—who never saw a regime he didn’t want to change—reportedly ordered the Pentagon to update plans to send 120,000 additional troops into the Persian Gulf. All this preparation and the inherent threat to strike Iran was ostensibly based on vague and unsubstantiated intelligence that Tehran had planned attacks on U.S. troops in the region. Murky and secretive intelligence, preemptive war plans, and unrepentant neocons sowing fear within the American populace. We’ve all seen this movie before, in Iraq, just sixteen years ago, and it didn’t end well. U.S. troops are still there and may be so indefinitely.

If the purported Iranian threats seem manufactured, its because they likely are. And all the wrongs Tehran allegedly perpetrated against the US are exaggerated and overblown. Sure, Iran is, like all countries, an imperfect actor. The Islamic Republic did hold America’s embassy staff hostage during the Carter years. Tehran has backed Hezbollah and Hamas, both of whom once specialized in suicide bombing attacks on civilians.

Still, it’s worthwhile—particularly in the serious business of war and peace—to step back, slow down, and walk a proverbial mile in others’ shoes. Let me offer, then, the view from Tehran; to see the world and the US through Iranian eyes. An honest historical appraisal of the complicated U.S.-Iranian relationship demonstrates that it was often Washington and its western allies that meddled in the region and acted as the aggressors.

Let us begin in 1941. Though Tehran declared neutrality in that war, Russia and Britain jointly invaded and occupied the country to secure control of its oil reserves. Then, in 1953, when a democratically elected prime minister – Mohammad Mossadegh – dared nationalize Iranian oil (which had been largely under foreign, Western corporate control) the CIA coordinated a coup with MI6 to overthrow the government. The dictatorial Shah was promptly put in power and ruled with an iron fist for the next 26 years. So much for America’s self-proclaimed title as the “beacon of democracy.”

Then, in 1980, when Iraq invaded and threatened to destroy Iran, the U.S. openly backed Saddam Hussein’s aggressive regime. The U.S. provided key intelligence in the form of satellite photos to the Iraqi Army, and granted Baghdad over $1 billion in economic aid. President Reagan, in an absurd twist of irony, sent a special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, to meet with Saddam. Their now infamous picture shaking hands is all over the web. Saddam regularly employed poison gas to attack Iranian formations. It is largely agreed that U.S.-supplied satellite imagery allowed Iraq to better calibrate these illegal, immoral, chemical attacks. Remember how this was viewed from Tehran: the American superpower, which had already overthrown Iranian democracy, was now backing Saddam in an aggressive war that posed an existential threat to the Islamic Republic.

During the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which caused perhaps a million deaths, the US Navy waged an undeclared maritime war in the Persian Gulf. In the “Tanker War,” the US again tacitly backed Iraq, flew the stars and stripes on Kuwaiti vessels to protect them from attack, and, finally, overtly sank the majority of the Iranian Navy in a one-sided sea battle. At the end of the war, a US naval vessel even shot down a civilian Iranian airliner, killing 290 people. The US commander, Captain Rogers, claimed his crew mistook the jet for an Iranian fighter, but even so the plane was fully in Iranian airspace.

In a final twist of the diplomatic “knife,” then-Vice President George H.W. Bush refused, during a presidential campaign stop, to apologize for the shoot-down. He callously announced “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are. … I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.” Oh, and as for Captain Rogers—he was awarded the Legion of Merit for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service.” This, despite the fact that his ship, the USS Vincennes, was actually in Iranian territorial waters when it murdered the innocent civilians onboard the flight.

Then, after the 9/11 attacks—which Iran had nothing to do with—Bush the Younger counted Tehran among Iraq and North Korea in an “axis of evil.” Soon enough, Bush II illegally invaded Iraq and toppled America’s one-time friend, Saddam Hussein. By 2003, Iran had American armies stationed on its western (Iraq) and eastern (Afghanistan) borders. It felt genuinely threatened, which was understandable given recent American military actions nearby and the fact that administration neoconservatives were itching for regime change in Iran. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” was a common trope around neocon circles in Washington. Given this history, it becomes rather more understandable that Iran would back militias and seek to keep the U.S. military mired in an Iraqi quagmire. If it didn’t, Iran’s leaders worried—they might be next!

None of this sordid history should be misconstrued to obviate Iran of responsibility for its own imperfect foreign affairs, but it does add complexity and nuance to a challenging relationship. Remember that the U.S. still imposes crippling sanctions on Tehran, surrounds Iran with its military bases, and maintains a naval presence along its coastline. Combined with America’s nefarious history of meddling in and threatening Iran, it’s hard not to empathize with the Iranian point of view.

Seen in this light, one understands why an average Iranian sees America as the aggressor in the Mideast. Well, frankly, it sort of is!

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. 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. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

White House Ends Fetal Tissue Research by Federal Scientists

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration said Wednesday it is ending medical research by government scientists using human fetal tissue, overriding the advice of scientists that there’s no other way to tackle some health problems and handing abortion opponents a major victory.

The Health and Human Services Department said in a statement that government-funded research by universities that involves fetal tissue can continue, subject to additional scrutiny.

The policy changes will not affect privately funded research, officials said.

Fetal tissue is used in research on HIV and childhood cancers, treatments that enlist the body’s immune system to battle cancer, and the hunt for a vaccine against the Zika virus, a cause of birth defects. The tissue from elective abortions would otherwise be discarded. Scientists use it to produce mice that model how the human immune system works.

Ending the use of fetal tissue by the National Institutes of Health has been a priority for anti-abortion activists, a core element of President Donald Trump’s political base.

The government’s top medical scientist, NIH Director Francis Collins, said as recently as last December that he believes “there’s strong evidence that scientific benefits come from fetal tissue research.”

A senior administration official said the decision announced Wednesday was the president’s call and not Collins’. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The government has funded research using fetal tissue for decades, under administrations of both political parties.

The government said there are currently at least three active federal research projects that involve human fetal tissue, and possibly as many as 12. Among university research projects funded by the government, officials said fewer than 200 of 50,000 rely on human fetal tissue.

No university-led programs will be affected for the time being, the administration said. New projects that propose to use fetal tissue and current projects up for renewal will be subject to additional reviews.

Last year, the administration announced a review of whether taxpayer dollars were being properly spent on fetal tissue research. As a result, NIH froze the procurement of new tissue. On Wednesday, the administration also said it is not renewing an expiring contract with the University of California, San Francisco that involves fetal tissue research.

Although HHS said it was trying to balance “pro-life” and “pro-science” imperatives, medical investigators said they feared the government would halt important research to satisfy anti-abortion activists.

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, said in a statement that the administration has “once again done the right thing in restoring a culture of life to our government.”

The Susan B. Anthony List, a group that works to elect lawmakers opposed to abortion, said in a statement that taxpayer funding ought to go to promoting alternatives to using fetal tissue in medical research.

The groups say alternatives are available; scientific groups say that’s not the case for every disease and condition.

Trump casts himself as “strongly pro-life,” and his administration has taken many steps to restrict access to abortion, which remains a legal medical procedure. Trump has nominated federal judges who oppose abortion, attempted to cut money for Planned Parenthood, and expanded legal protection for medical providers who object to abortion.

At a House hearing on the issue last December, neuroscientist Sally Temple told lawmakers the consensus opinion in the scientific community is that there is currently no adequate substitute for fetal tissue in some research areas.

Temple explained that tissue samples from different stages of the life cycle are not interchangeable. “It is not the same material,” she said. “It is a different developmental stage. It has unique properties.” She was testifying on behalf of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

Testifying on behalf of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which opposes abortion, biochemist Tara Sander Lee said tissues from infants who have to have heart surgery are among the alternatives. But Temple said researchers would readily use alternatives to fetal tissue if that was suitable.

Research involving fetal tissue accounted for $98 million in NIH grants and projects during the 2017 budget year, a small fraction of the agency’s overall research budget. NIH said that $98 million figure represents the entire budget for the grants at issue, even if only a smaller portion of a particular grant was devoted to fetal tissue research.

HHS said in its statement that is taking such steps through a $20 million grant program announced last December to “develop, demonstrate, and validate experimental models that do not rely on human fetal tissue from elective abortions.”

YouTube to Remove White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi Videos

SAN FRANCISCO—YouTube updated its hate speech policies Wednesday to prohibit videos with white supremacy and neo-Nazi viewpoints.

The video streaming company says it has already made it more difficult to find and promote such videos, but it’s now removing them outright. YouTube will also prohibit videos that deny certain proven events have taken place, such as the Holocaust.

The changes come as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other online services face mounting concern that the services allow, and in some cases foster, extremism.

YouTube’s new policies will take effect immediately. Specifically, the service is banning videos “alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion.” The ban applies to a range of characteristics, including race, sexual orientation and veteran status.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, said it’s removing thousands of channels that violate the new policies.

YouTube’s changes follow moves from Facebook to prohibit not only white supremacy, but also white nationalism and white separatism.

The two services, which allow people to create and upload their own materials, have faced considerable backlash about offensive videos on their services — and for how long they allowed live video feeds to stay online, such as during the mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The companies have said they are walking the balance between creating safe spaces while also protecting freedom of expression.

With little government oversight on online material, internet companies have become the arbiters for what is and isn’t allowed.

And the policies don’t always fall into clean, delineated lines.

YouTube is facing controversy over its refusal to remove videos from conservative commentator Steven Crowder, in which he uses homophobic slurs to describe Vox reporter Carlos Maza. YouTube said Crowder hasn’t told people to harass Maza, and the primary point of his video is to offer opinion, and thus it didn’t violate YouTube’s anti-harassment policies.

Criticism of the decision has poured out online. YouTube later said it had removed Crowder’s ability to make money on YouTube.

Crowder did not immediately respond to a request for comment but posted a video on Twitter saying his channel is not going anywhere.

Climate Change Threatens Societal Collapse Within Decades: Report

Even by the standards of the dire predictions given in climate studies, this one’s extreme: civilization itself could be past the point of no return by 2050.

That’s the conclusion from Australian climate think tank Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, which released a report (pdf) May 30 claiming that unless humanity takes drastic and immediate action to stop the climate crisis, a combination of food production instability, water shortages, and extreme weather could result in a complete societal breakdown worldwide.

“We must act collectively,” retired Australian Admiral Chris Barrie writes in the foreword to the new study. “We need strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities to ensure a sustainable future for humankind.”

Though the paper acknowledges that total civilizational collapse by 2050 is an example of a worst-case scenario, it stresses that “the world is currently completely unprepared to envisage, and even less deal with, the consequences of catastrophic climate change.”

David Spratt, Breakthrough’s research director and a co-author of the group’s paper, told Vice‘s tech vertical Motherboard that “much knowledge produced for policymakers is too conservative,” but that his new paper, by showing the extreme end of what could happen in just the next three decades, aims to make the stakes clear.

“Because the risks are now existential, a new approach to climate and security risk assessment is required using scenario analysis,” said Spratt.

The paper called on national security forces in Australia and across the world to step up to the challenge presented by the crisis.

“To reduce this risk and protect human civilization, a massive global mobilization of resources is needed in the coming decade to build a zero-emissions industrial system and set in train the restoration of a safe climate,” the report reads. “This would be akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization.”

On Tuesday, the idea of emergency mobilization akin to a world war was echoed by Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in an opinion piece for The Guardian.

Stiglitz called on world governments to recognize the level of threat that the climate crisis presents and to act accordingly:

Yes, we can afford it, with the right fiscal policies and collective will. But more importantly, we must afford it. Climate change is our World War III. Our lives and civilization as we know it is at stake, just as they were in World War II.

Spratt agreed that a sense of collective urgency must be seen as the crucial element for world governments.

“A short window of opportunity exists for an emergency, global mobilization of resources, in which the logistical and planning experiences of the national security sector could play a valuable role,” Spratt said.

Queen, World Leaders Honor Veterans on 75th Anniversary of D-Day

PORTSMOUTH, England—Queen Elizabeth II and world leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump gathered Wednesday on the south coast of England to honor the troops who risked and sacrificed their lives 75 years ago on D-Day, a bloody but ultimately triumphant turning point in World War II.

Across the Channel, American and British paratroopers dropped into northwestern France and scaled cliffs beside Normandy beaches, recreating the daring, costly invasion that helped liberate Europe from Nazi occupation.

With the number of veterans of World War II dwindling, the guests of honor at an international ceremony in Portsmouth were several hundred men, now in their 90s, who served in the conflict — and the 93-year-old British monarch, also a member of what has been called the “greatest generation.”

The queen, who served as an army mechanic during the war, said that when she attended a 60th-anniversary commemoration of D-Day 15 years ago, many thought it might be the last such event.

“But the wartime generation — my generation — is resilient,” she said, striking an unusually personal note.

“The heroism, courage and sacrifice of those who lost their lives will never be forgotten,” the monarch said. “It is with humility and pleasure, on behalf of the entire country — indeed the whole free world — that I say to you all, thank you.”

About 300 World War II veterans, aged 91 to 101, attended the ceremony in Portsmouth, the English port city from where many of the troops embarked for Normandy on June 5, 1944.

Mixing history lesson, entertainment and solemn remembrance, the ceremony was a large-scale spectacle involving troops, dancers and martial bands, culminating in a military fly-past. But the stars of the show were the elderly veterans of that campaign who said they were surprised by all the attention: They were just doing their jobs.

“I was just a small part in a very big machine,” said 99-year-old John Jenkins, a veteran from Portsmouth, who received a standing ovation as he addressed the event.

“You never forget your comrades because we were all in it together,” he said. “It is right that the courage and sacrifice of so many is being honored 75 years on. We must never forget.”

The event, which kicked off two days of D-Day anniversary observances, paid tribute to the troops who shaped history during the dangerous mission to reach beachheads and fight in German-occupied France.

D-Day saw more than 150,000 Allied troops land on the beaches of Normandy in northwest France on June 6, 1944, carried by 7,000 boats. The Battle of Normandy, codenamed Operation Overlord, was a turning point in the war, and helped bring about Nazi Germany’s defeat in May 1945.

Wednesday’s ceremony brought together presidents, prime ministers and other representatives of more than a dozen countries that fought alongside Britain in Normandy.

The leader of the country that was the enemy in 1944, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, also attended— a symbol of Europe’s postwar reconciliation and transformation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attended 70th anniversary commemorations in France five years ago, has not been invited. Russia was not involved in D-Day but was instrumental in defeating the Nazis on the Eastern Front.

The ceremony sought to take people back in time, with world leaders, reading the words of participants in the conflict.

Trump read a prayer that President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered in a radio address on June 6, 1944, extolling the “mighty endeavor” Allied troops were engaged in.

British Prime Minister Theresa May read a letter written by Capt. Norman Skinner of the Royal Army Service Corps to his wife, Gladys, on June 3, 1944, a few days before the invasion. He was killed the day after D-Day.

“Although I would give anything to be back with you, I have not yet had any wish at all to back down from the job we have to do,” he wrote.

French President Emmanuel Macron read from a letter sent by a young resistance fighter, Henri Fertet, before he was executed at the age of 16 years old.

“I am going to die for my country. I want France to be free and the French to be happy,” it said.

The ceremony ended with singer Sheridan Smith performing the wartime hit “We’ll Meet Again,” as many of the elderly assembled veterans sang along.

Then WWII Spitfire and Hurricane fighter jets, modern-day Typhoons and the Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows aerobatic unit swooped over the dignitaries, veterans and large crowd of spectators.

The crowd beyond the security barriers loved the planes but loved the veterans even more. Whenever their images came up on the big screen, people cheered. The former servicemen have reacted to such shows of attention with humility and surprise, as many believed they had been forgotten.

“What happened to me is not important. I’m not a hero. I served with men who were,” said Les Hammond, 94, who landed at Juno Beach with the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers. “I’m very lucky I’m a survivor.”

On Thursday the focus shifts to France, where commemorations will be held at simple military cemeteries near the Normandy beaches. Some 300 British veterans will cross the Channel by boat to the beaches overnight, just as they did 75 years ago.

Events in France began early Wednesday morning with U.S. Army Rangers climbing the jagged limestone cliffs of Normandy’s Pointe du Hoc to honor the men who scaled them under fire 75 years ago.

They were recreating a journey taken in 1944 by the U.S. Army’s 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions to destroy Nazi guns atop the cliffs, helping prepare the way for Allied troops to land on the coast.

Elsewhere in Normandy parachutists jumped from C-47 transporters in WWII colors and other aircraft, aiming for fields of wild flowers on the outskirts of Carentan, one of the early objectives for Allied troops.

Among the jumpers was American D-Day veteran Tom Rice, 97. He jumped into Normandy with thousands of other parachutists in 1944 and recalled it as “the worst jump I ever had.”

Like many other veterans, Rice said he remains troubled by the war.

“We did a lot of destruction, damage. And we chased the Germans out and coming back here is a matter of closure,” he said. “You can close the issue now.”

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Follow all the AP’s coverage of D-Day at https://apnews.com/WorldWarII

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Lawless reported from London. John Leicester in Carentan, France, Milos Krivokapic in Pointe du Hoc, France and Gregory Katz in London contributed.

Robert Reich: The Jig Is Up on the Gig Economy

Uber just filed its first quarterly report as a publicly traded company. Although it lost $1 billion, investors may still do well because the losses appear to be declining.

Uber drivers, on the other hand, aren’t doing well. According to a recent study, about half of New York’s Uber drivers are supporting families with children, yet 40% depend on Medicaid and another 18% on food stamps.

It’s similar elsewhere in the new American economy. Last week, the New York Times reported that fewer than half of Google workers are full-time employees. Most are temps and contractors receiving a fraction of the wages and benefits of full-time Googlers, with no job security.

Across America, the fastest-growing category of new jobs is gig work – contract, part-time, temp, self-employed and freelance. And a growing number of people work for staffing firms that find them gig jobs.

Estimates vary but it’s safe to say almost a quarter of American workers are now gig workers. This helps explain why the standard economic measures – unemployment and income – look better than Americans feel.

The jobs problem today isn’t just stagnant wages. It’s also uncertain incomes. A downturn in demand, change in consumer preferences, or a personal injury or sickness, can cause future paychecks to disappear. Yet nearly 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

According to polls, about a quarter of American workers worry they won’t be earning enough in the future. That’s up from 15% a decade ago. Such fears are fueling working-class grievances in America, and presumably elsewhere around the world where steady jobs are vanishing.

Gig work is also erasing 85 years of hard-won labor protections.

At the rate gig work is growing, future generations won’t have a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation for injuries, employer-provided Social Security, overtime, family and medical leave, disability insurance, or the right to form unions and collectively bargain.

Why is this happening? Because it’s so profitable for corporations to use gig workers instead of full-time employees.

Gig workers are about 30% cheaper because companies pay them only when they need them, and don’t have to spend on the above-mentioned labor protections.

Increasingly, businesses need only a small pool of “talent” anchored in the enterprise – innovators and strategists responsible for the firm’s competitive strength.

Other workers are becoming fungible, sought only for reliability and low cost. So, in effect, economic risks are shifting to them.

It’s a great deal for companies like Uber and Google. They set workers’ rates, terms and working conditions, while at the same time treating them like arms-length contractors.

But for many workers, it amounts to wage theft.

If America still had a Department of Labor, it would be setting national standards to stop this.

Yet Trump’s Anti-Labor Department is heading in the opposite direction. It recently proposed a rule making it easier for big corporations to outsource work to temp and staffing firms, and escape liability if those contracting firms violate the law, such as not paying workers for jobs completed.

On the other hand, California is countering Trump on this, as on other issues.

Last Wednesday, the California Assembly passed legislation codifying an important California Supreme Court decision: in order for companies to treat workers as independent contractors, the workers must be free from company control, doing work that’s not central to the company’s business, and have an independent business in that trade.

(The bill is not yet law. It still has to pass the California Senate and be signed by the governor. And businesses are seeking a long list of exemptions – including ride-share drivers and many of high-tech’s contract workers.)

For example, they need income insurance rather than unemployment insurance. One model: If someone’s monthly income dips below their average monthly income from all jobs over the preceding five years, they automatically receive half the difference for up to a year.

They’ll also need a guaranteed minimum basic income – a subsistence-level cushion against earnings downturns. And universal health insurance and more generous Social Security, to make up for the unpredictability of work.

All of this should be financed by higher corporate taxes, ideally in proportion to a corporation’s use of gig workers.

Gig work is making capitalism harsher. Unless the government defines legitimate gig work more narrowly and provides stronger safety nets for gig workers, gig capitalism cannot endure.

What’s Driving the American Cult of Endless War?

From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing — and yet more bombing. Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. “boots on the ground” and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington’s many conflicts. Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required). Its reality for various foreign peoples: a steady diet of “Made in USA” bombs and missiles bursting here, there, and everywhere.

Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America’s wars are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What’s driving this process?

For many of America’s decision-makers, air power has clearly become something of an abstraction. After all, except for the 9/11 attacks by those four hijacked commercial airliners, Americans haven’t been the target of such strikes since World War II. On Washington’s battlefields across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, air power is always almost literally a one-way affair. There are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses. The skies are the exclusive property of the U.S. Air Force (and allied air forces), which means that we’re no longer talking about “war” in the normal sense. No wonder Washington policymakers and military officials see it as our strong suit, our asymmetrical advantage, our way of settling scores with evildoers, real and imagined.

Bombs away!

In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress. Using data supplied by the U.S. military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the U.S. dropped at least 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, ISIS’s “capital,” the U.S. and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to literal rubble. Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International.

Meanwhile, since Donald Trump has become president, after claiming that he would get us out of our various never-ending wars, U.S. bombing has surged, not only against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but in Afghanistan as well. It has driven up the civilian death toll there even as “friendly” Afghan forces are sometimes mistaken for the enemy and killed, too. Air strikes from Somalia to Yemen have also been on the rise under Trump, while civilian casualties due to U.S. bombing continue to be underreported in the American media and downplayed by the Trump administration.

U.S. air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945, which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least 600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War. (Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term effects of cluster munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may well have exceeded one million.) Today’s air strikes are more limited than in those past campaigns and may be more accurate, but never confuse a 500-pound bomb with a surgeon’s scalpel, even rhetorically. When “surgical” is applied to bombing in today’s age of lasers, GPS, and other precision-guidance technologies, it only obscures the very real human carnage being produced by all these American-made bombs and missiles.

This country’s propensity for believing that its ability to rain hellfire from the sky provides a winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn’t led to ultimate success. In the case of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military’s arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger, as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to yet more destruction.

Such results are contrary to the rationale for air power that I absorbed in a career spent in the U.S. Air Force. (I retired in 2005.) The fundamental tenetsof air power that I learned, which are still taught today, speak of decisiveness. They promise that air power, defined as “flexible and versatile,” will have “synergistic effects” with other military operations. When bombing is “concentrated,” “persistent,” and “executed” properly (meaning not micro-managed by know-nothing politicians), air power should be fundamental to ultimate victory. As we used to insist, putting bombs on target is really what it’s all about. End of story — and of thought.

Given the banality and vacuity of those official Air Force tenets, given the twenty-first-century history of air power gone to hell and back, and based on my own experience teaching such history and strategy in and outside the military, I’d like to offer some air power tenets of my own. These are the ones the Air Force didn’t teach me, but that our leaders might consider before launching their next “decisive” air campaign.

Ten Cautionary Tenets About Air Power

1. Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn’t mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results.

2. Bombing alone will never be the key to victory. If that were true, the U.S. would have easily won in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. American air power pulverized both North Korea and Vietnam (not to speak of neighboring Laos and Cambodia), yet the Korean War ended in a stalemate and the Vietnam War in defeat. (It tells you the world about such thinking that air power enthusiasts, reconsidering the Vietnam debacle, tend to argue the U.S. should have bombed even more — lots more.) Despite total air supremacy, the recent Iraq War was a disaster even as the Afghan War staggers on into its 18th catastrophic year.

3. No matter how much it’s advertised as “precise,” “discriminate,” and “measured,” bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk) rarely is. The deaths of innocents are guaranteed. Air power and those deaths are joined at the hip, while such killings only generate anger and blowback, thereby prolonging the wars they are meant to end.

Consider, for instance, the “decapitation” strikes launched against Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and his top officials in the opening moments of the Bush administration’s invasion of 2003. Despite the hype about that being the beginning of the most precise air campaign in all of history, 50 of those attacks, supposedly based on the best intelligence around, failed to take out Saddam or a single one of his targeted officials. They did, however, cause “dozens” of civilian deaths. Think of it as a monstrous repeat of the precision air attacks launched on Belgrade in 1999 against Slobodan Milosevic and his regime that hit the Chinese embassy instead, killing three journalists.

Here, then, is the question of the day: Why is it that, despite all the “precision” talk about it, air power so regularly proves at best a blunt instrument of destruction? As a start, intelligence is often faulty. Then bombs and missiles, even “smart” ones, do go astray. And even when U.S. forces actually kill high-value targets (HVTs), there are always more HVTs out there. A paradox emerges from almost 18 years of the war on terror: the imprecision of air power only leads to repetitious cycles of violence and, even when air strikes prove precise, there always turn out to be fresh targets, fresh terrorists, fresh insurgents to strike.

4. Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works. If it did, the U.S. would have swept to victory in Vietnam. In Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, for instance, Operation Rolling Thunder(1965-1968), a graduated campaign of bombing, was meant to, but didn’t, convince the North Vietnamese to give up their goal of expelling the foreign invaders — us — from South Vietnam. Fast-forward to our era and consider recent signals sent to North Korea and Iran by the Trump administration via B-52 bomber deployments, among other military “messages.” There’s no evidence that either country modified its behavior significantly in the face of the menace of those baby-boomer-era airplanes.

5. Air power is enormously expensive. Spending on aircraft, helicopters, and their munitions accounted for roughly half the cost of the Vietnam War. Similarly, in the present moment, making operational and then maintaining Lockheed Martin’s boondoggle of a jet fighter, the F-35, is expected to cost at least $1.45 trillion over its lifetime. The new B-21 stealth bomber will cost more than $100 billion simply to buy. Naval air wings on aircraft carriers cost billions each year to maintain and operate. These days, when the sky’s the limit for the Pentagon budget, such costs may be (barely) tolerable. When the money finally begins to run out, however, the military will likely suffer a serious hangover from its wildly extravagant spending on air power.

6. Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading. Command of the high ground is not synonymous with god-like “total situational awareness.” It can instead prove to be a kind of delusion, while war practiced in its spirit often becomes little more than an exercise in destruction. You simply can’t negotiate a truce or take prisoners or foster other options when you’re high above a potential battlefield and your main recourse is blowing up people and things.

7. Air power is inherently offensive. That means it’s more consistent with imperial power projection than with national defense. As such, it fuels imperial ventures, while fostering the kind of “global reach, global power” thinking that has in these years had Air Force generals in its grip.

8. Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them. Consider Vietnam again. In the early 1960s, the Air Force argued that it alone could resolve that conflict at the lowest cost (mainly in American bodies). With enough bombs, napalm, and defoliants, victory was a sure thing and U.S. ground troops a kind of afterthought. (Initially, they were sent in mainly to protect the airfields from which those planes took off.) But bombing solved nothing and then the Army and the Marines decided that, if the Air Force couldn’t win, they sure as hell could. The result was escalation and disaster that left in the dust the original vision of a war won quickly and on the cheap due to American air supremacy.

9. Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time. The enemy, lacking it, nonetheless learns to adapt by developing countermeasures — both active (like missiles) and passive (like camouflage and dispersion), even as those being bombed become more resilient and resolute.

10. Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war.

The Road to Perdition

If I had to reduce these tenets to a single maxim, it would be this: all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results.

For this reason, precision warfare is truly an oxymoron. War isn’t precise. It’s nasty, bloody, and murderous. War’s inherent nature — its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency to outlast its original causes and goals — isn’t changed when the bombs and missiles are guided by GPS. Washington’s enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own turf.

Who doesn’t know the old riddle: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Here’s a twenty-first-century air power variant on it: If foreign children die from American bombs but no U.S. media outlets report their deaths, will anyone grieve? Far too often, the answer here in the U.S. is no and so our wars go on into an endless future of global destruction.

In reality, this country might do better to simply ground its many fighter planes, bombers, and drones. Paradoxically, instead of gaining the high ground, they are keeping us on a low road to perdition.