Chris Hedges's Blog, page 403

Assessing Osama bin Laden’s Legitimate Grievances, 17 Years On

You’re not supposed to utter these words, but what the heck: Osama bin Laden had a point. No, his grievances, as well as those of his followers and sympathizers, didn’t excuse the mass murder of 9/11—not by a long shot. After all, I am a native New Yorker whose family and neighborhood were directly touched by the horror of those inexcusable attacks. Still, more than 17 years after the attacks on the Pentagon and twin towers, it’s worth reflecting on bin Laden’s motives and discussing the stark fact that the United States government has made no moves to address his gripes.

Now is as good a time as any. The U.S. military remains mired in wars across the Greater Middle East that have now entered their 18th year. The cost: $5.9 trillion, 7,000 dead American soldiers, at least 480,000 locals killed and 21 million refugees created. The outcome: more instability, more violence, more global terror attacks and a U.S. reputation ruined for at least a generation in the Islamic world.

Need proof? Consider the regular polling that indicates that the U.S. is considered the greatest threat to world peace. Not China, Russia, Iran or even North Korea. The United States of America.

Why, exactly, is the U.S. so unpopular, from West Africa to South Asia? This can be explained in part by the mere presence—sustained, at that—of U.S. troops in the region. As a historian, I can assure you that folks don’t usually take well to being occupied. Nevertheless, it’s more than that. And here’s the rub: Washington, unwilling to even consider the grievances bin Laden and his acolytes clearly communicated, has instead doubled down on militarism in the region—thereby turning al-Qaida’s fringe complaints into a mainstream sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world.

Let’s review the three core grievances in bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa—essentially a declaration of war—against the U.S., and then look over Washington’s contemporary policies on the issues:

Bin Laden objected to the presence of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia specifically and across the region more generally, due to their proximity to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Furthermore, bin Laden criticized the U.S. backing of Saudi Arabia’s despotic royal regime.

But rather than pull its troops “offshore,” the U.S. military has expanded its empire of bases, both in the Mideast and throughout the world. Despite the slaughter in Yemen and the murder of a Washington Post journalist, Washington still inflexibly backs the Saudi monarchy. The U.S. has even negotiated record arms contracts with the kingdom, to the tune of $110 billion. Clearly, Washington has only doubled down on this front.

The al-Qaida chief lamented the starvation blockade that the West—led by Washington—imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. Make no mistake: Saddam was no friend of bin Laden—in fact, they were mortal enemies. But the well-reported deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children, victims of the sanctions during that period, are what motivated bin Laden’s concern. The blockade was so hard and its civilian toll so gruesome that the United Nations aid chief, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest in 1998. Optically, the U.S. government response came across as both coarse and callous. When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked in a “60 Minutes” interview in 1996 whether the price of a half-million dead children was worth the benefits of the sanctions, she cold-heartedly replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

Today, in addition to the unwarranted 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which caused at least another 200,000 civilian casualties, the U.S. is complicit in a new blockade, this one imposed by Washington’s Saudi allies in Yemen. Recent reports indicate that some 85,000 Yemeni children have already starved to death in the 3–year-old war on the poorest Arab country. Undeterred, the U.S. continues to provide munitions, intelligence and in-flight refueling to the Saudi military. This veritable war crime has galvanized an increasing anti-American regional public just as intensely as the 1990’s sanctions on Iraq once did.

Bin Laden, like many global Muslims, felt sympathy for the generations-long plight of the occupied Palestinians and abhorred America’s one-sided support for Israel’s military and governing apparatus. The U.S. has been almost alone in its willingness to flout international law, U.N. resolutions and a basic sense of humanity in its backing of Israel since 1948.

Here again, nothing has changed. Washington has simply doubled down. Israel remains the principal recipient of U.S. military aid, with almost no strings attached. U.S. media and Washington policymakers rarely mention the slaughter of mostly unarmed Palestinian demonstrators protesting along the Gaza fence line in the past eight months. The results have been striking: 5,800 wounded and at least 180 killed since March. American mainstream media may not take much note of this, but guess who does? A couple of million Muslim citizens worldwide. In fact, the ongoing protests kicked off partly in response to President Trump’s near unilateral decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that essentially announced that in American eyes, the Holy City belongs to the Jews alone.

The reasons behind American intransigence and obtuseness in Mideast affairs should come as no surprise. The U.S. is a nation built on a millenarian, exceptionalist ideology and has long been driven by a mission to spread its message across the globe. A populace—and government—infused with these ideas is unlikely to demonstrate the humility to take a proverbial look in the mirror and admit fault. This became especially unlikely in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when passions reached a fever pitch and chauvinistic nationalism became the name of the game. Even then, however, credible voices questioned America’s rush to war, including scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk, and even comedians like Bill Maher.

Seventeen years into the nation’s longest war, there are plenty of crucial reasons to review bin Laden’s grievances, consider his arguments and show the strength of character to acquiesce on certain points. This is sobriety, not surrender. After all, self-awareness is a sign of strength and maturity in nations, as well as in individuals.

After years of counterproductive U.S. policies and Mideast interventions, the nation is left with a stark choice: admit error and alter policy, or wage an indefinite worldwide war on a significant portion of the Islamic population. The former option would lessen violence and ultimately lead to a safer homeland, but it would require confronting an uncomfortable truth that most Americans simply can’t face: Bin Laden was a monster, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong on all fronts.

Jill Stein Touts Historic Victory for Pennsylvania Voters

Electronic voting machines are prone to failures. In a 2015 report, the Brennan Center for Justice detailed how these systems are “often unauditable, susceptible to malware, frequently difficult to repair, and more prone to failure.” Researchers haven’t found much cause for optimism in follow-up reports. States are using machines that are more than 10 years old, and only one state—Virginia—has replaced its paperless machines. The settlement of a lawsuit against Pennsylvania, however, may be a small but notable first step in the fight for fairer elections.

After the 2016 election, former presidential candidate Jill Stein sued Pennsylvania, calling for an end to the use of paperless voting machines susceptible to tampering, hacking and general errors. On Thursday, Stein announced a settlement with the state.

The settlement guarantees that Pennsylvania will replace its current system with paper ballots by 2020. In addition, by 2022 the state will enact automatic audits after every election to ensure the accuracy of vote counts before results are certified.

“This is a critical victory for everyone concerned with the integrity of our elections,” Stein said in a statement, adding:

We congratulate the state of Pennsylvania for raising the bar not only for Pennsylvanians, but for voters everywhere. By agreeing to end the use of paperless voting machines, Pennsylvania is not only safeguarding its citizens’ right to vote. By example, the agreement is also a big step towards the retirement of paperless voting machines that one in four voters across the nation are still required to use, despite their demonstrated vulnerability to hacking, tampering, and error. Automatic robust audits provide an essential safeguard by cross-checking paper ballots against machine totals using hand counts and the human eye to make sure every election is verified before the results are official. These two reforms are a first step to restoring confidence in our broken elections.

Stein was also behind the campaign for a recount of the results in the 2016 election in other key contested states, including Wisconsin and Michigan.

Wisconsin’s recount ended only minimally different from the original count, with Trump adding 131 votes out of 3 million ballots, according to The Associated Press.

Stein’s request for the Michigan recount was denied, although she raised the money for one.

Read the entire Pennsylvania settlement here.

 

Will Bolsonaro Follow in Pinochet’s Footsteps?

Still shocked by the electoral results in Brazil, many Brazilians are asking how an avalanche of votes for Jair Bolsonaro and General Hamilton Mourão took place and what exactly will happen when a right wing extremist government takes over. We are still a long way off from answering this, but the connections between Bolsonaro’s main economic guru, Paulo Guedes, and the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), give us important leads about the underlying plans.

Until recently, Paulo Roberto Nunes Guedes (69) was relatively unknown to the Brazilian public. Although he was a columnist for Epoca magazine and O Globo newspaper and founder of the Millenium Institute, the economist spent decades isolated from the mainstream, rejecting all of Brazil’s economic plans for the last 35 years, from those of President José Sarney to Dilma Rousseff. Reading some of his articles it becomes clear why. Guedes shows an aversion to the social contract guaranteed in the 1988 Constitution, which he interprets as an obstacle to his political project. For him, Brazil suffered from an “interventionist curse” which has blocked the “irreversible evolutionary process (…) towards a great open society.”

On May Day, 2017, Guedes wrote, “the right wing hegemony governed for two decades and the left wing hegemony governed for three, both with a disastrous, interventionist economic model.” In his mind, the 30 years of democratic Brazil, from Fernando Collor to Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula and Dlima all comprised part of the same hegemonic left. Looking at this tabula rasa, it’s not hard to understand his political preferences. The social rights system guaranteed in the 1988 Constitution may have has survived to the present day, at least on paper, but Guedes is part of the group that wants to exterminate it by capitalizing on the authoritarian wave of Jair Bolsonaro. This implies a radicalization and destruction of the democratic contract. But how will he try to do it?

From Chicago to Chile

Guedes got his PhD in Economics from University of Chicago, a center of Austrian-American neoliberalism dominated by figures like Milton Friedman, in 1978. As Friedman says in his book Freedom of Choice, it was a time in which his “apostles” were “wandering in the desert”. Forged in Chicago, Guedes economically-extremist vision has not caught on in Brazil until now. But the contrary happened in Chile. The first laboratory of the Shock Doctrine, as Naomi Klein designated the process, resulted from the Freidman-Pinochet alliance. It was there that the brothers in faith from Chicago found perfect partners for their economic plans after September 11, 1973: Chilean militarism and fascism promised, at the same time, repression and “innovation”.

The inspiration for Guedes’ recent proposals for pension and education reform come from the Pinochet dictatorship, tied to the idea of a “subsidiary state.” Antithetical in many ways to the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, the Chilean Constitution of 1980 was imposed by the Dictatorship and preserved to this day. Contrary to the idea of State as guarantor of rights, the subsidiary Chilean State was relieved of the responsibility for promoting welfare to its citizens and converted into a financier for market expansion. This has taken place through massive transfers of public resources to the private sector while generating a perverse public debt.

In Chicago, Guedes earned his doctorate with a 63 page, typewritten dissertation. His work, according to Folha de São Paulo newspaper, “was never published and had no repercussions in Brazil,” which caused him to resent his more successful colleagues. This bitterness became public recently, when he called his ex-student, economist Elena Landau, “mediocre”, alleging that he had flunked her during her Master’s degree work at PUC University in Rio. Elena Landau, 9 years younger than Guedes, was one of the most important economists in Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s privatizations, coordinating the sale of Electrobras state energy company for the National Destatization Council during the 1990s. With her transcripts in hand, Landau disproved his claim, saying, “It’s Paulo who was a poor professor. He missed classes and didn’t correct papers.”

Professor Paulo Guedes entered the University of Chile in a suspicious manner during the 1980s, during the height of the dictatorship, after a broad purge of critical intellectuals. As Federico Fullgraf writes, the Chilean dictatorship viewed the universities as one of the main “theaters of war”, a territory to be retaken from the “Marxist enemy”. In the place of critics, professors were hired who were aligned with the only school of thought that the military supported in academia. Milton Friedman and his allies had been attracting Chilean economists to Chicago since the 1950s, working to reinsert them into academic positions in the country’smain universities. However it was only with Pinochet that the Chicago Boys political experiment consolidated. Guedes was part of this movement, along with his colleague, the Chilean businessman Jorge Constantino Demetrio Selume Zaror (67). In returning from Chicago, where he first med Guedes, Selume also joined the economic cathedral of the University of Chile. In a few years he became Pinochet’s director of budgets and oversaw privatizations of state companies such as Chliectra and Entel. At the same time, he built a financial empire which included banks and real estate. Among them, Rupanco, a 47,000 hectare farm which had been redistributed to the workers during the Salvador Allende government, but that was appropriated by the military in 1979 and given to the El Cabildo S.A. company, which was later taken over by the Selume family. According to Fullgraf, “ Selume is a kind of unofficial spokesman of the hard line Pinochet supporters in the private sector.

It was in this manner, taking over the position of a professor who was arbitrarily fired by the dictators, that Guedes left his part-time teaching jobs at PUC-Rio, IMPA and FGV-Rio, in exchange for, according to him, a “too good to refuse” salary of $10,000/month. When asked about his ties to the Chilean dictatorship, however, he changes the subject to his supposed academic qualifications and tells a story of how he was once inspected by Pinochet’s political police.

Private Retirement Pensions and the Shock of Poverty

During the years in which Guedes lived in Chile, José Pinera, the most powerful Chicago Boy and brother of current Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, completely privatized the retirement system through a decree issued by Dictator Pinochet on November 13, 1980. In this system, formed today by an oligopoly of six private pension funds, wage earners are required to deliver 10% of their salaries for capitalist speculation with no counterpart from the employer. Currently, after 30 years of contribution, 90% of Chilean retirees receive pension checks worth less than half of the national minimum wage of 154,000 Pesos (approximately $220). Symptomatically, the pension system privatization does not apply to members of the military.

Driven by the same kind of pro-capitalization rhetoric that paved the way for Michel Temer’s failed pension reform efforts in 2017, the Chilean pension system represents the appropriation of more than 10 million worker’s retirement funds. Today, five of the six existing pension funds manage 69.6% of the country’s GDP and 94.6% of its social security contributions, having accumulated profits of $ 1.5 million a day in 2017, according to the Sol Foundation.

The collection system is based on individualism, not solidarity, because each worker depends exclusively on himself to increase the value of his pension. Furthermore, pensioners are susceptible to market volatility, trapped in the pension fund managers’ mathematical models. During recent years, the retirement pension crisis has led to dramatic increases in suicides of Chilean seniors: nearly 1000 in 5 years. Since 2016, popular anger against the privatized retirement system has caused gigantic street protests, led by the #No+AFP movement.

In Brazil, the project that would accelerate the deterioration of public welfare was rejected by the population in 2017. But popular resistance was only one of the factors that blocked the Temer government from approving the project, as it was also bogged down in the costly bribery dynamics of a system of corrupt political parties. It is worth noting here that Paulo Guedes is under investigation on the federal police’s Operation Greenfields, which is investigating fraud in management of private pension funds that generated R$6 billion in profit between 2009 -2013. There is also evidence of money laundering by the HSM Educational SA company, which paid Guedes millions of reais in speaking fees.

Guedes privatization crusade finds itself confronted by resistance on the streets on the one hand, and on the other, by a governmental machine which wants a piece of the spoils. This is why he seems be thinking of the Pinochet era when he calls for a shock of capitalism that can only be imposed through militaristic force, all for his own benefit.

Pinochetista Clans and Big Data

The Millennium Institute has an ideological sister organization in Santiago with much more influence over its nation‘s politics: The Liberty and Development Institute, a private organization run as a company which was founded in 1990 in the luxurious neighborhood of Las Condes. Organized by business leaders and high level cabinet ministers from the Pinochet administration like Hernán Buchi, Carlos F. Cáceres, Cristián Larroulet and Luis Larrain Arroyo, the institute is recognized for working as a revolving door for business executives from major corporations to enter the government and consolidate their company’s market positions from inside the state apparatus.

This organization provided ten important members of the government of President Sebastian Pineira, who recently said, “on the economic front, Bolsonaro is heading in the right direction.” It is not only the Pineira family, however, who view the emergence of Bolsonaro positively. His right wing extremist competitor from the 2017 Chilean presidential elections, José Antonio Kast, is the Chilean politician most invested in a partnership. The businessman of German descent was the fourth most popular presidential candidate last year, with 523,000 votes. On October 18th, Kast traveled to Rio de Janeiro to meet with Bolsonaro. Afterwards, he published a photo smiling next to the captain in his social media accounts. “Today we met with Jair Messias Bolsonaro and wished him luck in the election. We gave him a Chile jersey so that we can continue strengthening the relationship between both countries and, together, build an alliance that can definitively defeat the left in Latin America,” he said.

In addition to both being admirers of Pinochet, Kast and Bolsonaro rely on a political strategy based on clans. Senator Felipe Kast, nephew of José Antonio Kast, ran for office as part of the coalition which elected Pinera, and was his planning minister in his previous government. During the primaries, Felipe Kas was supported by Jorge Selume Aguirre, the son of the businessman who studied with Guedes – a 37 year old psychologist who was recently nominated as Pinera’s Communications Secretary. Selume Jr.’s resume features a diploma from Adrés Bello University (part of the Laureate, for profit university multinational, directed by his father), and years of work at Cambridge Analytica. Not less important is the fact that young Selume is the owner of Artool, the largest Chilean big data company.

If there are signs that the Jair Bolsonaro campaign in Brazil could have been strengthened – as was the case of Donald Trump in the US – with the theft of millions of people’s personal data from the social media networks, among them WhatsApp, and the dissemination of fake news on a previously unseen scale, the Chilean far-right has all of the tools to do it.

A Revolving Door with Private Education

The narrow circle of Brazilian and Chilean right wing extremists closes with the Arab businessman Jorge Selume, father of Pinera’s recently nominated communications secretary. As previously mentioned, Selume was Guedes’ classmate in Chicago during the 1970s. During the 1980s, he built an economic empire from the largest financial operation ever to take place in Chile at the time. Together with Laz Diez Mesquitas, a consortium of Arab-owned companies, he bought Banco Osorno and sold it to Santander in 1985 for 495 million dollars. At the same time he served as Pinochet’s Budget Director.

Today it is more and more clear that education and culture are priority frontiers for the expansion of neo-pinochetista business negotiations. Jorge Selume Jr. created a powerful communications and political marketing machine with Artool and spurred the election of 46 mayors from the Partido Renovacion Nacional in 2016, using Cambridge Analytica techniques. Furthermore, Banco de Chile and Banco Santander, which together hold at least half of the national population’s bank accounts, are among Artool’s top clients.

Meanwhile, Jorge Selume, the father, has been investing in education for years and is now one of the most influential executives in the for-profit education multinational Laureate, which is being investigated for fraud in the private university accreditation system. In Brazil, Laureate has prioritized distance learning. It is no coincidence that Paulo Guedes defends a “shock of digital inclusion in grammar school,” Bolsonaro has been talking about distance learning for children and the name of Stravos Xanthopoylos, international relations director for the Brazilian Association of Distance Learning, has been cited for Education Minister in the future right wing extremist government- if the ministry will even continue to exist.

What Is in Store for Us?

During his first interview with the international press after his connection with Jair Bolsonaro became public in November, 2017, Guedes said, “the last 30 years have been a disaster – we corrupted democracy and stagnated the economy (…) We should have done what the Chicago Boys defended.”

When asked why he would associate with known defender of the Brazilian military dictatorship, during an event organized by the Credit Suisse bank in São Paulo, Guedes classified this type of question as “patrolling”. In talking about his long conversations with Bolsonaro, he repeated one of his favorite catchphrases, playing on the words on the Brazilian flag: “who knows if order isn’t speaking with progress?”

It is not hard to decipher the message between the lines. The first time that Latin America witnessed an organic union between the military and the Chicago Boys in a government was in 1973 in Chile, a chapter of history written in buckets of blood. All that is left for Brazilians is to find out what kind of situation this dangerous association will lead to.

This article was originally published in LeMonde Diplomatique Brasil, was translated by Brian Mier and can be seen in its original form here.

Censoring Facebook Censors Us All

A couple of bank robbers phone one another and agree to meet at a local diner. Over ham and eggs, they talk over their next heist. Then they drive to a nearby branch and make off with the loot.

Question: What is the phone company’s legal responsibility in this affair? Is it guilty of aiding and abetting because a couple of bad guys used its facilities to engage in a criminal conspiracy? How about the short-order cook: Is he guilty because he provided them with needed sustenance? Is the manufacturer of the getaway car liable as well?

Most people would say no, on the grounds that if they are guilty, then anyone is guilty who in some way unknowingly contributes to a crime. But The New York Times and other news outlets disagree. It has taken the dubious concept of an unknowing accomplice and used it to mount an aggressive campaign against Facebook and other social media. Their alleged crime: failing to stop foreign powers from using their networks in ways the Times deems harmful to American political health. It’s like attacking Verizon or AT&T for failing to stop people from using their phones to call a drug dealer or send a sexually explicit text to an underage adolescent.

The hue and cry couldn’t be more dangerous, because the clear implication is that if Facebook doesn’t police its network, someone else will do it instead. That someone could be self-appointed guardians of the public trust, such as the Times, or various federal agencies. But the effect will be the same. Free speech will narrow, debate will turn lifeless and dull, and censorship will creep in through the back door. Liberals are outraged because Donald Trump tried to banish a notorious attention-hog like CNN’s Jim Acosta from the White House press pool. But what they’re doing is far worse, because it involves a systematic crackdown on the entire internet.

As a recent Times editorial put it:

[T]he fundamental design of social media sometimes exacerbates the problem. It rewards loyalty to one’s own group, providing a dopamine rush of engagement that fuels platforms like Facebook and YouTube, as well as more obscure sites like Gab or Voat. The algorithms that underpin these networks also promote engaging content, in a feedback loop that, link by link, guides new audiences to toxic ideas.

The solution is what the editorial calls “a coherent strategy” to keep dangerous information out of the hands of ordinary people who can’t handle a Facebook high. Unable to judge for themselves what’s toxic, the Times thinks, Americans need a powerful authority figure to do it for them.

The Times, the leader of the anti-free-speech crusade, employs a logic all its own. Not only does it assume that Facebook must be at fault because someone, somewhere, is using it for nefarious purposes, but it cherry-picks the data to make the situation seem worse than it really is—rather as if not one but every diner in America was filled with baddies plotting murder and mayhem. A mammoth front-page article that ran Nov. 14 thus asserts that unnamed malefactors have used the network “to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe.” When Trump called for a shutdown on Muslim immigration in December 2015, the story adds, it “illustrat[ed] the site’s power to spread racist sentiment” because Facebook users shared the item some 15,000 times.

This certainly sounds ominous. But the Times quoted the same call to arms in a Dec. 8, 2015, news story on its website and in a video. Considering that its website gets some 130 million hits a month, does that illustrate the Times’s power to spread racist sentiment as well?

The article goes on to say that Alex Stamos, Facebook’s in-house security chief, discovered “that Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns” in early 2016. Months later, it adds, the Stamos team “also found Facebook accounts linked to Russian hackers who were messaging journalists to share information from the stolen emails.”

This also sounds ominous, but at the same time curiously vague. After all, what does “linked” mean—that hackers owned such accounts or occasionally logged into them? What is a Russian hacker, anyway—someone who lives in Russia or works for the Russian government or merely has a Russian name? What does it matter if hackers alerted journalists to the content of certain emails? If the information is solid, isn’t that all that counts?

Answers to questions like these are essential if readers are to understand what the Facebook controversy is about—who’s using it, how extensively and to what end. But they are questions the Times systematically avoids. The article says that, on Sept. 6, 2017, Facebook issued a short notice regarding alleged Russian interference. But it complains that the notice “said little about fake accounts or the organic posts created by Russian trolls that had gone viral on Facebook, disclosing only that Russian agents had spent roughly $100,000—a relatively tiny sum—on approximately 3,000 ads.”

“Just one day after the company’s carefully sculpted admission,” the piece continues, “The Times published an investigation of further Russian activity on Facebook, showing how Russian intelligence had used fake accounts to promote emails stolen from the Democratic Party and prominent Washington figures. The combined revelations infuriated Democrats, finally fracturing the political consensus that had protected Facebook and other big tech companies from Beltway interference. Republicans, already concerned that the platform was censoring conservative views, accused Facebook of fueling what they claimed were meritless conspiracy charges against Mr. Trump and Russia. Democrats, long allied with Silicon Valley on issues including immigration and gay rights, now blamed Mr. Trump’s win partly on Facebook’s tolerance for fraud and disinformation.”

Republicans and Democrats can’t resist bashing an easy target? So what else is new?

In fact, the Facebook summary of its in-house investigation was more nuanced than the Times let on. While it identified some 470 “inauthentic accounts” responsible for purchasing $100,000 worth of ads, it found that the purchases had taken place over a two-year period beginning in June 2015, meaning that many had occurred after Nov. 8, 2016, and therefore had no effect on the election. (Indeed, Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch would later testify that only $46,000 was spent prior to Election Day, which means the intervention was even less impressive than the Times indicated.) Facebook also found that “the vast majority … didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election” and instead “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum—touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.” Even though the Times has repeatedly implied that the accounts are linked to the Kremlin, Facebook added that all it could determine is that they “likely operated out of Russia.”

So whatever goals such Russians had in mind, electing Donald Trump does not appear to have been one of them. Yet the Times tailored the evidence to make it seem that a great conspiracy was underway that Facebook was too negligent, lazy or corrupt to stop. As with “Russiagate” in general, the goal was to “externalize” America’s problems by attributing them to others while letting the U.S. itself off the hook. Why engage in painful self-criticism when it’s so much easier to criticize others instead?

Since that article, the anti-Facebook jihad has continued pretty much nonstop. Four days later, Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg castigated Zuckerberg for “publicly doubting the effects of the disinformation campaign taking place on his platform.” Zuckerman’s crime, it seems, was declaring, shortly after Trump’s election, that it was “pretty crazy” to suggest that fake news had swung the contest in his favor, adding, “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience. There is a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news.” But after years of sound and fury about Russian manipulation and little evidence to back such charges up, such words seem more than sensible, while Rutenberg’s seem feverish and overblown.

Five days after that, op-ed columnist Jennifer Senior sailed into Facebook No. 2 Sheryl Sandberg for “work[ing] to minimize findings that the Russians had taken up residence on Facebook in 2016 in order to sow disinformation in the run-up to the American presidential election.” A day later, Times opinion writer Kara Swisher lamented that because he owns 60 percent of Facebook stock, Zuckerberg “is unkillable, unfireable, and untouchable.” Plainly, Swisher longs to drive a stake through the man’s heart, if only the Times’ ethics code would let her.

Not that the Times is the only one playing this game. The New Yorker also pitched in by finding a former Facebook vice president who said, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.” (This was undoubtedly where the Times got its anti-drug imagery from.) Not to be outdone, The Guardian described Zuckerberg as “an autocrat pretending to be president,” while Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen said that it was no surprise “that the people responsible for running a website that entices people to reveal their personal innards so that the website can, in turn, monetize their heartfelt ruminations and day-to-day minutiae are so ethically challenged. … The odds of Facebook changing much, short of substantive legislation out of Washington, [are] less than zero.”

Facebook-bashing is thus all the rage. But does The New Yorker honestly think that Facebook is destroying society? And what kind of “substantive legislation” does WaPo have in mind? Does it really want the federal government to blacklist information that Americans supposedly can’t handle?

Facebook deserves the same scrutiny as any other megacorporation. But criticizing it is one thing, censoring its users quite another. As Matt Taibbi points out in Rolling Stone, the campaign has already led to the purge of hundreds of Facebook sites, many by all appearances on the up and up. The fact that the network, in its effort to weed out “fake news,” is now teaming up with the Atlantic Council, a hawkish Washington think tank funded by oil companies, arms manufacturers, Ukrainian oligarchs and the United Arab Emirates, shows where all this is heading, i.e., toward a strengthening of the most bellicose elements in Washington and the further marginalization of dissent. When Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline, who will likely head the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel come January, tweets that “Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself,” it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what will happen next.

If jackbooted fascists tried to impose censorship, Americans would take to the streets. But when Democrats do it, they’re disarmed. Is this how free speech dies—from a liberal stab in the back?

Michael Cohen Pleads Guilty to Lying to Congress

NEW YORK—Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, made a surprise appearance before a federal judge in New York on Thursday to plead guilty to lying to Congress about work he did on an aborted project to build a Trump Tower in Russia.

Flanked by his lawyers, Cohen admitted making false statements in 2017 to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the project.

Cohen told the judge he lied about the timing of the negotiations and other details to be consistent with Trump’s “political message.”

Cohen and prosecutors referred to Trump as “individual one” throughout Thursday’s proceedings and said he lied “to be loyal to Individual One.”

Among other lies, Cohen said he told Congress that all discussions of the Moscow Trump Tower project ended by January 2016, when they had actually continued until June of that year.

One of the prosecutors working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller was present in the courtroom.

Cohen’s lawyer, Guy Petrillo, said he would give the court a letter outlining how his client has cooperated with Mueller’s investigation.

In August, Cohen pleaded guilty to other federal charges involving his taxi businesses, bank fraud and his campaign work for Trump.

Reacting to the plea to the new charges, House Speaker Paul Ryan said Cohen “should be prosecuted to the extent of the law. That’s why we put people under oath.”

Cohen gave a statement to congressional committees last year saying the president’s company pursued a project in Moscow during the Republican primary but that the plan was abandoned “for a variety of business reasons.”

Cohen also said he sent an email to the spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin as part of the potential deal.

In his statement, he said that he worked on the real estate proposal with Felix Sater, a Russia-born associate who he said claimed to have deep connections in Moscow.

The discussions about the potential development began after Trump had declared his candidacy. Cohen had said the talks ended when he determined that the project was not feasible.

Cohen had also disclosed that Trump was personally aware of the deal, signing a letter of intent and discussing it with Cohen on two other occasions.

Senate Delivers Powerful Rebuke to Trump, Saudi Arabia

The Senate slapped the Trump administration around on Wednesday, voting 63-37 to bring to the floor a proposal to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

I should declare my own interest by saying that I was one of 50-some Middle East experts and policymakers who signed a letter to the senators urging them to take this step. The letter, organized by Bruce Ackerman, Laurence Tribe and former U.S. ambassadors to Yemen Barbara Bodine and Stephen Seche, pointed out that the U.N. estimates that some 14 million Yemenis could die of starvation within months if the Saudis continue their total-war tactic of attacking port infrastructure to deprive civilians of access to staples.

The vote was the most significant bipartisan measure to come out of the Senate in ages, and fell just short of a veto-proof two-thirds majority. The bill, co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders and a bipartisan set of his colleagues, calls on Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. troops from their support role in Yemen within 30 days. Since the war begin in 2015, the U.S. (initially under President Obama) has given the Saudis logistical support, including in-air refueling of bombers, as well as strategic advice on targeting.

The senators voted to get out even though Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned them not to vote for withdrawal. Pompeo threatened them with losing their next election if they were seen by their constituents to have allowed Iran a free hand in Yemen. The Saudis and the U.S. right-wing vastly exaggerate Iran’s role in Yemen; the rebellion is mainly led by indigenous Yemeni Zaydis, who belong to a branch of Shiite Islam that differs significantly from the Twelver branch practiced in Iran and Iraq. In any case, it is likely that most of the senators’ constituents would be rather more upset about U.S. involvement in provoking the biggest humanitarian crisis since the end of WWII. The Saudi-led war has already killed 85,000 children by malnutrition and has killed tens of thousands of other civilians (which official statistics cover up).

Pompeo also argued that this bill could make the Houthi rebels more intractable at upcoming peace talks.

The vote likely reflected, in part, senators’ anger over the murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist at The Washington Post, which everyone on Capitol Hill reads. Many have been angered and frustrated by Trump’s collaboration in covering up the murder in the interest of maintaining business ties with Saudi Arabia (given that some of those ties may have been to Trump’s personal business). Mattis and Pompeo probably lost Republican votes with their smug denials that the U.S. is sure Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the hit.

The senators were also angry that the White House appeared to prevent CIA director Gina Haspel from testifying to them. The Washington Post has reported that the CIA assesses that Khashoggi’s murder was ordered by the crown prince and that his brother Khalid, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., was deeply involved in the assassination plot.

I’ve been involved in a fair number of briefings on the Hill, and I can tell you that it is hard to get the senators to spend their time on foreign affairs. Both houses of Congress have for decades shirked their constitutional role in declaring war, as successive presidents ordered police actions and even full-scale wars at will.

The step taken by the Senate on Wednesday is not unprecedented. The victory in the House of Democrats in 2006 encouraged George W. Bush to make preparations for getting out of Iraq.

In 2013, the Republican majority in Congress signaled to Obama that it would not authorize the use of force in Syria, which pushed Obama to agree to Russia sequestering Syria’s chemical weapons instead.

It is unclear how the Senate will vote on the bill itself (this vote was just to bring it to the floor for a vote), and even more unclear how the House will vote on this bill. And, of course, Trump may be veto it without the Senate sponsors having a two-thirds majority to overrule his veto.

But at the least the Senate won’t have contributed to a famine situation without so much as a protest.

Economy Rises at a Solid 3.5% Annual Rate for Quarter

WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy expanded at a solid 3.5 percent annual rate in the July-September quarter, led by lower but still strong consumer spending and more business investment than previously estimated.

The Commerce Department’s figure for gross domestic product, released Wednesday, was the same as its first estimate last month. GDP is the broadest measure of the nation’s output of goods and services and covers everything from homebuilding to haircuts. Greater corporate investment offset downward revisions in spending by state and local governments and consumers.

The third quarter figure follows a robust expansion of 4.2 percent in the April-June quarter. Six months of healthy growth have put the U.S. economy on track to expand in 2018 at its fastest pace in 13 years. Still, economists forecast that growth will slow in the fourth quarter and decelerate further next year.

Borrowing costs are headed higher as the Federal Reserve raises short-term interest rates. That has lifted mortgage rates and weighed on home and auto sales. The Trump administration’s trade fights have also raised uncertainty for many companies and may cause them to delay investments. And the boost to consumer spending from last year’s tax cuts is likely to fade by next year.

The Trump administration has imposed tariffs on about half the goods that the United States imports from China, and has threatened to impose tariffs on the rest. That would raise prices on billions of dollars of consumer goods, including smartphones, tablets, toys and shoes.

“A trade war remains the biggest downside risk to near-term growth,” said Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC.

Economists at JPMorgan Chase forecast that growth will slow to 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter and 2.2 percent in the first three months of 2019.

Even so, growth is on pace to top 3 percent this year for the first time since 2005. Consumer confidence is near 18-year highs, and the unemployment rate is at a nearly five-decade low of 3.7 percent.

Consumers lifted their spending 3.6 percent at an annual rate in the third quarter, a solid pace but down from the government’s first estimate of 4 percent. State and local governments spent just 2 percent, down from the previous estimate of 3.2 percent.

Those declines were offset by greater business investment: Companies spent more on equipment and did not cut back nearly as much on their spending on buildings as initially estimated. Businesses also spent more to stockpile goods on store shelves and in warehouses.

The inventory building occurred as businesses stepped up their efforts to import more goods before January, when U.S. tariffs on $200 billion of imports from China are expected to jump to 25 percent, from 10 percent.

Imports surged 9.2 percent in the third quarter as companies sought to get ahead of the increased tariffs. Trump has also threatened to slap import taxes on car.

Exports fell 4.4 percent as more U.S. goods are facing retaliatory tariffs abroad. Exports of U.S. soybeans had jumped in the second quarter in advance of a large tariff increase imposed by China, a key market for U.S. soybeans. Those exports fell back in the third quarter.

The drop in exports and increase in imports in the third quarter meant that international trade cut into growth by the most since 1985.

U.N. Chief: G-20 Leaders Need Bolder Action at Critical Time

UNITED NATIONS—U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has a message for leaders of the 20 major economic powers ahead of this week’s summit: Take stronger leadership and bolder action to tackle critical problems from climate change to inequality at a time the world is facing “a crisis of confidence.”

Before flying to Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the Group of 20 meeting, the U.N. chief told reporters Wednesday it is imperative that countries work together to create a fairer world.

“Those left behind by globalization are losing trust in governments and institutions,” he warned.

He said inequality is “pervasive and increasing,” trade disputes are escalating, and geopolitical tensions “are adding further pressure to the global economy.”

In addition, Guterres said, “We are headed for a world of cataclysm and uncertainty due to climate disruption.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently said time is running out if the world wants to achieve the most ambitious target in the 2015 landmark Paris climate agreement — keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The planet has already warmed about 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times and is on course for another 2 to 3 degrees of warming by the end of the century unless drastic action is taken, its report said.

“The social, economic and environmental costs of climate change dwarf the costs of acting now,” Guterres said.

“Failure to act means more disasters and emergencies and air pollution that could cost the global economy as much as $21 trillion by 2050,” he said. “On the other hand, ambitious climate action will not only slow temperature rise, it will be good for economies, for the environment and for public health.”

Guterres said the G-20 members are responsible for more than three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, and they have the money and power to tackle the climate issue.

The secretary-general said he has the same message for the G-20 and for the leaders who will be meeting in Poland beginning Sunday to try to agree on the fine print of the Paris agreement: “At a time of declining global trust, our world needs stepped-up global leadership.”

“Strong economic growth, reduced inequality, and limiting carbon emissions are possible and compatible,” he said. “But we need greater ambition. We are in a race for our future. It’s a race we can and simply must win.”

Guterres, who will also attend the climate meeting in Katowice, Poland, said national leaders need to make their countries more ambitious in tackling problems like climate change but they also must be open to compromise because agreement “is the most important objective.”

In a letter, the secretary-general Guterres urged G20 leaders to give high priority to implementing and financing the 17 U.N. development goals for 2030 aimed at closing the inequality gap. They include ending extreme poverty, providing secondary education for all children and achieving gender equality, zero hunger and sustainable cities.

Guterres also urges the G-20 leaders to help equip people with the skills to work amid technological progress and digitalization. Noting that the number of hungry people around the globe has risen to 821 million, he welcomed G-20 efforts to ensure “a sustainable food future” and improved food and nutrition.

He also called on G-20 leaders to move beyond pledges on gender equality and act against the discrimination, violence and unequal access to resources faced by “an overwhelming majority of women across the globe.”

On the issue of migration, Guterres said that in many cases it “continues to be unsafe, disorderly and unregulated.” He urged G-20 leaders “to support a global migration system that can accommodate the demand for mobility that exists in our increasingly dynamic populations.”

Big Pharma, Bad Policy Are Keeping the World From Ending AIDS

If you cure illnesses, said Goldman Sachs Vice President Salveen Richter, it will disrupt “sustained cash flow.” Far better to find medical treatments that provide some solace but that prolong illnesses. Even better if these treatments are both necessary and expensive. If you find a cure for an illness, then you will find—as Richter wrote in her analysis for Goldman Sachs—“a gradual exhaustion of the prevalent pool of patients.” That’s the worst thing imaginable for pharmaceutical companies and their investors. Keep the goose alive as long as it keeps laying golden eggs.

December 1st is World AIDS Day. In 1987, two public information officers at the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) came up with the idea of such a day, which was then promoted by the UN from 1988 onwards. For a decade, World AIDS Day helped shape public consciousness about the ferocity of the disease. By 1990, almost 300,000 people died of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) per year, while about 10 million people suffered from HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). World AIDS Day and activist groups fought to ensure that AIDS was not seen as a curse on homosexual men and that it was seen as both preventable and curable. This was an enormous burden, given the homophobia in society and the cuts to public health that states around the world were being forced into by the policy framework of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

By 2018, 30 years after the origin of World AIDS Day, it is assumed that such concern is anachronistic. There is a sense that homophobia is less virulent and that the health care industry—both the pharmaceutical and medical sides—have taken hold of this epidemic. By last count of the WHO, more than 70 million people have been afflicted with the HIV virus, and by the end of 2017, 36.9 million people live with the HIV virus (under 1 percent of the world’s population). It is true that in many parts of the world, the HIV virus has been brought under control by technologies of prevention and of care. Part of this is because the health care infrastructure in the affluent world has not been totally devastated and partly because the pharmaceutical industry has come up with successful drugs to contain the virus. This is—of course—not the case for the affluent world’s working poor, who are sapped by the evisceration of health care.

In other parts of the world—in Africa and Asia, for instance—the HIV virus continues to be very dangerous. On large parts of the African continent, 1 in 25 adults has the HIV virus—just above 4 percent of adults. These men and women make up two-thirds of all those people who carry the HIV virus. What is important to focus on is that they live in countries where the IMF has systematically undermined state-provided health care—particularly primary health care—and where the cost of the drugs to contain the HIV virus remains prohibitive. It might well be that in the affluent parts of the world one can be sanguine about the HIV-AIDS epidemic. But it is certainly not something to dismiss in large parts of the world where the states remain under pressure to cut costs and where pharmaceutical companies find human bodies upon whom to do test trials rather than to cure.

Right to Health

It has long been the hope of human beings that preventable diseases should be eradicated by the use of changes in behavior and by the use of medicines. Every Indian child in the 1970s remembers the government posters that urged people to boil their water and to get vaccinated. It was thought that primary health care and education about health would pave the way toward a healthier world. At the 1978 World Health Organization conference at Alma Ata (USSR), governments of most countries said that by the year 2000 the level of health will permit people “to lead a socially and economically productive life.” It was underlined that “primary health care is the key to attaining this target as part of development in the spirit of social justice.”

Since 1978, the United Nations General Assembly has regularly argued—as it did in 2012—for “universal access to affordable and quality health-care services.” But the policy framework pushed on the majority of the countries of the world went in the other direction. The focus on the bad policy choices pushed on these countries should have been laser-sharp after the Ebola outbreak of 2013-2016 in West Africa. An important study in the Lancet (2015) found that in the three countries hit hardest by the outbreak—Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone—IMF policies had forced the governments to undermine their health care delivery services. The study found that in Sierra Leone, the IMF policies had severely reduced public sector employees. Between 1995 and 1996, the IMF required the state to cut 28 percent of its employees, including those in the health delivery sector. Stunningly, the WHO found that Sierra Leone’s community health care workers fell from 0.11 per 1,000 (in 2004) of the population to 0.02 per 1,000 (in 2008). This was the absolute antithesis of the Alma Ata Declaration.

Last week, in Savar, Bangladesh, the delegates assembled for the Fourth People’s Health Assembly. They came from far and wide, arguing for a return to the dynamic of which the Alma Ata Declaration was a part. The situation is now at an emergency footing, with public health institutions virtually destroyed and with plunder by pharmaceutical companies a normal situation. The WHO and World Bank found that by 2010, nearly 808 million people had incurred “catastrophic spending on health” because of the costs of drugs and because of the privatization of health care.

There is virtually no outrage at the IMF policy framework that destroys the health care infrastructure in the Global South. Saccharine pop-star humanism that begins with Bob Geldof’s Do They Know It’s Christmas (1984) merges with the equally syrupy tech-philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (2000) to throw a shroud over the African continent. Nothing that Bono and Bill can do undermines the sharp edge of IMF policy and the theft of Africa’s riches by monopoly firms (including those mining companies that provide the raw materials for the computers that made Bill Gates his wealth).

Return of AIDS

Earlier this year, in April, the UN General Assembly heard the summary of a report on the need for urgency regarding the return of AIDS. Even though AIDS deaths have declined since 2010 by a third, there has been an uptick in the number of deaths. This is of concern. Serious-minded public health specialists worry that this rise in AIDS deaths has come as health infrastructure has been weakened and as pharmaceutical companies continue to charge absurdly high prices for HIV-AIDS drugs.

The same month, in April, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)—which was founded in 1987—held a protest in New York City against Gilead Sciences, a monopoly pharmaceutical company. The drug in question for ACT UP is Truvada, a drug that reduces the chances of HIV infection. ACT UP says that a course of Truvada costs Gilead about $6/month to manufacture, but it charges patients an astronomical $1,500/month. What is scandalous is that the research for this drug was funded not by Gilead but by public funds and by philanthropists.

When a Goldman Sachs analyst says that the point is to make money from illness, she is merely mirroring the reality of the brutishness of capitalism. Serious conversations need to take place about the way in which monopoly pharmaceutical firms draw public funds to protect themselves from risk and then charge high prices to make astronomical profits. Questions need to be asked about the IMF policy space that makes it impossible to detect the virus and even harder to care for its victims.

It’s not enough to wear a ribbon on World AIDS Day. Go out onto the streets with a group of friends. Carry a sign. Let it say: More Public Health and Cheaper Drugs. If you want to end HIV-AIDS by 2030, the prescription is as simple as that.

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

Senate Defies Trump, Showing Anger With Saudis for Khashoggi

WASHINGTON—Defying President Donald Trump, senators sent a strong signal Wednesday that they want to punish Saudi Arabia for its role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. By a bipartisan 63-37 vote, the Senate opted to move forward with legislation calling for an end to U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

The vote was a rebuke not only to Saudi Arabia but also to Trump’s administration, which has made clear it does not want to torpedo the long-standing U.S. relationship with Riyadh over the killing.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense James Mattis both came to Capitol Hill to urgently lobby against the resolution, which would call for an end to U.S. military assistance for the conflict that human rights advocates say is wreaking havoc on Yemen and subjecting civilians to indiscriminate bombing.

The vote showed a significant number of Republicans were willing to break with Trump to express their deep dissatisfaction with Saudi Arabia and with the U.S. response to Khashoggi’s brutal killing in Turkey last month. U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, must have at least known of the plot, but Trump has equivocated over who was to blame.

Khashoggi, who lived in the U.S. and wrote for The Washington Post, was publicly critical of the Saudi crown prince. He was killed in what U.S. officials have described as an elaborate plot at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, which he had visited for marriage paperwork.

Echoing Trump’s public comments on the killing, Pompeo said after Wednesday’s briefing with senators that there was “no direct reporting” connecting the crown prince to the murder, and Mattis said there was “no smoking gun” making the connection.

Pompeo argued that the war in Yemen would be “a hell of a lot worse” if the United States were not involved.

Wednesday’s procedural vote sets up a floor debate on the resolution next week. It would be largely a symbolic move, however, as House Republican leaders have given no indication they would take up the war powers measure before the end of the year — the end of the current Congress.

Several senators said they were angry about the absence of CIA Director Gina Haspel from the pre-vote briefing.

New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, speculated that Haspel didn’t attend because she “would have said with a high degree of confidence that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was involved in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”

And Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is often strongly allied with Trump, voted to move forward with the resolution and said he would insist on a briefing from Haspel. He even threatened to withhold his vote on key measures if that didn’t happen and declared, “I’m not going to blow past this.”

CIA press secretary Timothy Barrett said that no one kept Haspel away from the briefing. He said the CIA had already briefed the Senate intelligence committee and Senate leaders and “will continue to provide updates on this important matter to policymakers and Congress.”

In another explanation, a White House official said Haspel decided not to participate in part because of frustration with lawmakers leaking classified intelligence from such settings. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

The procedural vote received more Republican support than had been expected after the resolution, sponsored by Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, fell six votes short of passage earlier this year.

Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said in the past he had “laid in the railroad tracks to keep us from doing things that I believe are against our national interest as it relates to Saudi Arabia.” But he said he believes the Senate should “figure out some way for us to send the appropriate message to Saudi Arabia that appropriately displays American values and American national interests.”

He said the crown prince “owns this death. He owns it.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., voted against moving ahead with the resolution but said a day earlier that “some kind of response” was needed from the United States for the Saudis’ role in Khashoggi’s death. On Tuesday, he said that “what obviously happened, as basically certified by the CIA, is completely abhorrent to everything the United States holds dear and stands for in the world.”

Pompeo said U.S. involvement in the Yemen conflict is central to the Trump administration’s broader goal of containing Iranian influence in the Middle East. His language was blunt in a Wall Street Journal article, writing that Khashoggi’s murder “has heightened the Capitol Hill caterwauling and media pile-on. But degrading U.S.-Saudi ties would be a grave mistake for the national security of the U.S. and its allies.”

Trump has said it may never be known who was responsible for the killing, and in public comments — and a long and unusual statement last week — he reinforced the United States’ long-standing alliance with the Saudis. Trump has praised a pending arms deal with the kingdom that he says will provide the U.S. with jobs and lucrative payments, though some outside assessments say the economic benefits are exaggerated.

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Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Zeke Miller, Matthew Daly, Kevin Freking, Maria Danilova and Laurie Kellman in Washington contributed to this report.