Chris Hedges's Blog, page 422

The New York Times ‘Needle’ and the Damage Done

On Election Night, what’s the proper role for political journalism?

Of course, it’s easy to say: Just report the election results, and put it into context. But what happens when corporate media—in their zeal to give the public the big picture (and to draw eyeballs)—get too far ahead of the actual facts?

Projecting winners in individual races based on official returns, exit polls and precincts left to report is one thing. But extrapolating early results to make broad leaps in logic about what will happen hours later, across dozens of states where polls haven’t even closed yet, is quite another. That can be a reckless gambit, one that doesn’t take much to turn supposedly “objective” data journalism into flawed, rank speculation, as anyone closely following the whipsawing Election Night media narrative on Tuesday can attest.

If political  journalism has become increasingly about polls and the horserace, Election Night coverage has grown to be more and more about flashy gimmicks and real-time scoreboard watching. On TV, this has evolved into things like hologram pundits, as well as the ubiquitous, massive touchscreens that dominate every studio. There’s also been a corresponding push online to create eye-catching dashboards that let you know not just who is ahead right now, but who will likely end up winning at the end of the night. Which brings us to “the needle.”

On Election Night 2016, the New York Times prominently deployed on its homepage a supposed gauge of presidential fortunes. The needle’s now infamous journey, from heavily favoring the odds of Hillary Clinton to preferring Donald Trump as the night went on, notoriously sent chills through many Times readers and the punditocracy.

As did its nerve-wracking “jitter,” which was—tellingly—an artificially added dramatic element to make the needle look like it was constantly responding to new inputs. A gimmick within a gimmick, in other words, whose only real mission was to keep its online audience glued to its perambulations.

Whether you loved or hated it, the needle’s captivating showmanship made an instant impact. Every one of its shifts, left or right, was soon breathlessly reported elsewhere online and on cable TV. Never mind the oversimplified nature (and ethical complications), it soon became the journalistic totem of 2016 Election Night coverage, sublimating reporting on down-ballot races and the policy implications of a Trump win under a torrent of mindless needle-watching. So, not surprisingly, it spawned competitors for the 2018 midterm elections.

Sensitive to the many criticisms of the needle, however, the New York Times did make a number of changes to how it deployed its dual projection needles—one for control of the House, one for the Senate—heading into Tuesday Night. Gone was the fake jitter, for one. And the paper’s managing editor, Joe Kahn, also told Vanity Fair in a story from Monday (11/5/18) that the needle would be de-emphasized online as well Kahn said the House and Senate projection needles

will be accessible via a module on the home page, although perhaps not as prominently as in 2016. “We expect it to generate a lot of attention,” he said, “and to be a really useful early indicator of which way things are going.”

But the tip off here are the words “attention” and “early indicator.”  Though the needles’ projections are based on “intensive, precinct-by-precinct data,” according to Kahn, that doesn’t change that its fundamental missions are to drive traffic and time-on-page by essentially trying to get ahead of the facts. The same goes for the projection that ABC News’ data sub-site, FiveThirtyEight, rolled out Tuesday night.

It was the latter that most clearly showed just how problematic these real-time projections can be. The day before Election Day, FiveThirtyEight’s final poll-based projection gave the Democrats an 86 percent chance of retaking the House. But just after polls began closing on Election Night, the whiplash set in.  At 7:48 pm (all times EST), Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight’s editor-in-chief, tweets:

It’s always hard to know, with a live election night model, whether you’ve got things set up too conservatively or too aggressively. But our model really likes how things are going for Democrats in the House so far.

But just a half-hour later, after some discouraging results from Florida, FiveThirtyEight’s model had suddenly cut in half the Democrats’ chances of retaking the House, to 39.3 percent.

Other sites that follow FiveThirtyEight echoed its projections in turn. Just minutes later, at 8:24 pm, the popular Twitter account Political Polls (@PPollingNumbers) sent out a tweet—that quickly went viral—estimating the odds of a House Democratic majority had slipped to 30 percent.

The failed blue wave media narrative then spread like wildfire. CNN panelists David Axelrod and Van Jones immediately bought into this pessimistic narrative to proclaim “no blue wave,” as did Jake Tapper, after a tough-to-flip Kentucky House seat was called for the Republican incumbent in the 8:00 hour. Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera likewise tweeted “no wave” at 8:34 pm. The mainstream media’s conventional wisdom on the 2018 midterms outcome was already being cast, in other words, while many of the country’s polling stations were still open.

We now know this narrative wasn’t just premature, it was flat wrong.

Notably, the Times had yet to launch its projection needles at this point in the evening, due to “technical difficulties,” according to Times polling expert Nate Cohn. And then Silver chimed in on Twitter to acknowledge volatility flaws in his model:

Well, I’m trying to do six things at once–we think our live Election Day forecast is definitely being too aggressive and are going to put it on a more conservative setting where it waits more for projections/calls instead of making inferences from partial vote counts.

It wasn’t just the political press bubble being affected, however. When FiveThirtyEight’s shockingly rosy projection for the Republicans went public, bond traders in London reacted in something of a momentary panic. As the Financial Times (11/8/18) explains, the prospect of two more years of unified GOP control in Washington, DC, sent US government bonds skyrocketing between 8 and 9 pm (1 to 2 am, Greenwich time). “At one point,” FT reported, “the ten-year fetched a yield of 3.24 percent. The two-year, 2.95 percent (a level not breached since the global financial crisis).”

Whoopsie daisy?!

And while the transparency shown by Cohn and Silver is admirable, their mea culpas prompt a deeper question about the journalistic value of models that purport to peer into the future so fully. Especially if these models can so easily make bold guesses that defy common sense and don’t wait for the actual facts on the ground.

Though dozens of competitive races were still yet to be called, FiveThirtyEight’s model pretty quickly backtracked, and turned more favorable toward the Democrats. As a result, at 9:11pm, Political Polls tweeted out that the odds of a Democratic House takeover were 50/50. Same site, a mere 33 minutes later, after the Times needle debuted and FiveThirtyEight had swung back to favor Democrats: “BREAKING NEWS! DEMS WILL GAIN CONTROL OF THE HOUSE FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2010.”

To recap, in the span of 80 minutes on Election Night, the odds of a Democratic takeover of the House went from a roughly 2–1 underdog bet to 50/50 to fait accompli.

But even then, the Times and FiveThirtyEight projections kept on underestimating the Democrats’ wide-ranging successes. Only after a day, and armed with the luxury of time and and a much more comprehensive list of actual results, did Nate Cohn (11/8/18) finally capture the broad and deep impact of Tuesday’s “blue wave” in a thoughtful and incisive analysis of the election. Or, as Silver himself admitted on Twitter on Wednesday, Election Nights have so many moving parts and stressors that “it’s easy to make both Type I (overreaction) and Type II (under-reaction) errors.”

In the end, it defies reality to think that this past Tuesday’s media-manufactured rollercoaster ride was in any way representative of the real-world prospects of the Democrats on Election Night. In fact, Tuesday’s results were notable for how closely they tracked pre–Election Day polling, and how the final number of Democratic pick-ups—somewhere between 34 and 37 House seats at this point—fell in line with so many middle-of-the-road, simple math analyses. The net effect: Those who had ignored these projections altogether on Election Night, and just waited to read the final vote tallies the day after, would’ve have likely been better informed than someone who was glued to the falsely fluctuating flutters—and resulting pundit overreactions—all night long.

As a result, it’s hard to point to any substantial, net positive journalistic value from these catchy but problematic projection models during this past—or any—Election Night. Both ABC News and the Times should take a long, hard look at whether all that traffic they’re getting is worth potentially betraying their readers—and the whole media ecosystem with them—for a supposed peek into a future that won’t ever exist.

Tens of Thousands Flee Fast-Moving Northern California Fire

OROVILLE, Calif.—Tens of thousands of people fled a fast-moving wildfire Thursday in Northern California, some clutching babies and pets as they abandoned vehicles and struck out on foot ahead of the flames that forced the evacuation of an entire town.

Everyone in Paradise, a community of 27,000 people about 180 miles (290 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco, was ordered to get out. As she fled, Gina Oviedo described a devastating scene in which flames engulfed homes, sparked explosions and toppled utility poles.

“Things started exploding,” Oviedo said. “People started getting out of their vehicles and running.”

Authorities were working on a plan to remove patients from a hospital after rescuers had to turn back because of gridlocked traffic.

“It’s a very dangerous and very serious situation,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said. “I’m driving through fire as we speak. We’re doing everything we can to get people out of the affected areas.”

Shari Bernacett said her husband tried to get people to leave the Paradise mobile home park they manage and had minutes to evacuate.

He “knocked on doors, yelled and screamed” to alert as many residents as possible, Bernacett said.

“My husband tried his best to get everybody out. The whole hill’s on fire. God help us!” she said before breaking down crying. She and her husband grabbed their dog, jumped in their pickup truck and drove through flames before getting to safety, she said.

Officials were sending as many firefighters as they could, Cal Fire spokesman Rick Carhart said.

“Every engine that we could put on the fire is on the fire right now, and more are coming,” he said. “There are dozens of strike teams that we’re bringing in from all parts of the state.”

The blaze destroyed an unknown number of structures and injured some people, but the extent of the injuries was not immediately known, said Capt. John Gaddie of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The sheriff confirmed reports that evacuees had to abandon their vehicles. He said rescuers were trying to put them in other vehicles.

“We’re working very hard to get people out. The message I want to get out is if you can evacuate, you need to evacuate,” Honea said.

The wildfire was reported around daybreak. Within six hours, it had grown to more than 26 square miles (69 square kilometers), Gaddie said.

“The blaze is being driven by fairly strong winds,” Carhart said. “It’s really dry and we have low humidity, and unfortunately those are great conditions for a fire to spread.”

Thick grey smoke and ash filled the sky above Paradise and could be seen from miles away.

At the hospital with the stranded patients, some buildings caught fire and were damaged, but the main facility, Adventist Health Feather River Hospital, was not, spokeswoman Jill Kinney said.

Four hospital employees were briefly trapped in the basement and rescued by California Highway Patrol officers, Kinney said.

More than 40 patients were evacuated to other facilities. Twenty others were still awaiting rescue.

The National Weather Service issued red-flag warnings for fire dangers in many areas of the state, saying low humidity and strong winds were expected to continue through Friday evening.

___

Associated Press writers Paul Elias, Jocelyn Gecker and Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco and Sophia Bollag in Sacramento contributed to this report.

Can Officials Meet the Friday Deadline in the Georgia Governor’s Election?

Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp resigned as his state’s top election officer on Thursday, declaring victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams—before the vote counting was finished, let alone officially certified—and saying as governor-elect that he would now focus on his transition to higher office.

“We won the race,” Kemp said Thursday. “It’s very clear now. We are moving forward with the transition.”

However, Georgia’s Democratic Party and Abrams’ campaign said not so fast. They were hoping that tens of thousands of still-uncounted ballots would push Kemp just below the 50 percent vote count threshold, which would require a runoff election in several weeks.

“We know that victory is within our grasp,” her campaign said. “There are still thousands of ballots yet to be counted; thousands of Georgians whose voices have been shouted down by agents of voter suppression. … We believe we are headed for a runoff.”

Despite these competing claims, Abrams faces a steep climb to trigger a runoff election in December. Kemp is leading with 50.3 percent to Abrams’ 48.7 percent out of 3.9 million votes cast. Abrams and a Libertarian candidate, Ted Metz, need an estimated 25,000 votes to trigger a runoff between the top two.

The Democrats believe that there may be 30,000 or more uncounted votes that face a Friday afternoon deadline to be verified or rejected, according to an expert retained by the party. These votes are mostly in provisional ballots (given to voters not on polling place voter lists) and a smaller number of absentee ballots (mailed or dropped off).

“There are probably 30,000 or so uncounted votes,” the adviser said. “But not all provisional ballots will be counted. And not all will go to her, although the vast majority will.”

Whether or not all of Georgia’s county election boards will be able to meet Friday’s close of business deadline is an open question. In some counties in the Atlanta region, there is a backlog of paperwork to be processed inside of election offices and a corresponding push by the Democrats to assist anyone to ensure their vote will be counted—not rejected.

“Tomorrow is kind of the big day,” the campaign adviser said. “But I don’t know that they can get it done. They’re supposed to get it done by the close of business tomorrow. But the volume is huge. This election is a disaster.”

County election officials were not providing lists of voters who cast provisional ballots. As a result, Democrats have been contacting voters who called into the party’s election protection hotline, to see if they need help with presenting additional IDs and arranging rides for those needing to file that information in person at county election boards.

“There’s a field organization going out to get voters who voted by provisionals,” he said. “They are hearing from thousands of people. And they are trying to get those people and whatever issue it is resolved before Friday. That’s the drill.”

Most of these voters were legally registered but went to the wrong precinct—meaning their votes should count.

“Most were in the right county but the wrong precinct. Those are automatically counted. That’s the majority of them,” he said. “The people we are running after is less than half of the provisional ballots. They are people who showed up and their ID was allegedly not sufficient.”

This scramble is the latest chaotic and anti-democratic feature of Georgia’s midterms, an election cycle that has been marred by a long list of bureaucratic barriers and procedural hurdles that’s led election scholars to call Kemp the nation’s leading vote suppressor.

However, the finish line processing of 2018 ballots will not end with voters showing up with additional IDs at county offices by close of business on Friday. Rejected ballots go before canvassing boards, composed of local officials, that will examine signatures on various forms, ballots and envelopes to decide if they will be counted or not.

The canvassing boards have a lot of discretion. While a court ordered the state to notify voters whose absentee ballot envelopes were rejected, there have been reports that some number of these ballots were simply “reclassified” and rejected for other technicalities.

County election officials are slated to certify the 2018 election’s results next week. However, as this timeline unfolds, it is likely that some litigation will be filed to delay or challenge the process—especially as ballot verification practices have varied widely.

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

White House Smears CNN Reporter With Doctored Video

On Wednesday, mere hours after President Donald Trump forced Jeff Sessions out as attorney general, the White House revoked the press pass of CNN’s Jim Acosta. The decision was confirmed by press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who wrote in a tweet that evening, “President Trump believes in a free press and expects and welcomes tough questions of him and his Administration. We will, however, never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern. …”

By Thursday, Sanders had released a video of Acosta allegedly chopping at the arm of an aide. At first glance, the footage seems to capture the confrontation as it unfolded on live television, with the reporter resisting the woman’s efforts to seize his microphone. But upon closer examination, a segment of the tape appears to have been doctored to make his action look more violent than it actually was. It also lacks audio of Acosta telling the White House staffer, “Pardon me, ma’am.”

1) Took @PressSec Sarah Sanders’ video of briefing

2) Tinted red and made transparent over CSPAN video

3) Red motion is when they doctored video speed

4) Sped up to make Jim Acosta’s motion look like a chop

5) I’ve edited video for 15+ years

6) The White House doctored it pic.twitter.com/q6arkYSx0V

— Rafael Shimunov

Thousand Oaks Mass Shooter May Have Suffered From PTSD, Sheriff Says

America woke up to news of yet another mass shooting Thursday morning. Twelve people are dead at the hands of alleged shooter Ian David Long, a 28-year-old who threw smoke bombs and fired bullets into a Thousand Oaks, Calif., bar.

Long, who also died of a gunshot wound, which may have been self-inflicted, was a former Marine who may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Ventura County’s sheriff told the Los Angeles Times.

“Obviously, he had something going on in his head that would cause him to do something like this,” Sheriff Geoff Dean told ABC. “So he obviously had some sort of issues.”

Dean told the Times that his department had multiple interactions with Long prior to Thursday’s shooting, and had sent out officers in response to complaints of Long disturbing the peace. Police brought in mental health professionals to evaluate him, but they determined he did not need to be taken into custody.

One neighbor, Richard Berge, told the Times that Long had PTSD and had kicked the walls of his mother’s home, where he lived. “She’s a very sweet woman,” Berge said of Long’s mother. “But she had a lot of problems with the son. … I just know he tore the house up.”

Berge, who also spoke to ABC, told reporters that Long “wouldn’t get help.”

The Marine Corps released Long’s record, which shows that he served from 2008 to 2013 and was deployed to Afghanistan from Nov. 16, 2010, to June 14, 2011. He was a corporal and a machine gunner.

Although the sheriff’s office, early news report and Long’s neighbors contend that he suffered from PTSD, there is no indication in currently available reports that he had been diagnosed with the condition by a medical professional. In fact, Dean said at a 7 a.m. news conference, “We have no idea what the motive was at this point.”

The link between PTSD and violent acts is still unclear and requires more research. “The closer we get to trying to understand how PTSD relates to extreme violence, the more we get anecdotal,” Paula Schnurr, deputy director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for PTSD, in Vermont, told The Washington Post in 2012.

Matthew Friedman, the center’s director, was even more cautious, telling the Post, “To pick PTSD and highlight it in the way it’s been played out in the media is a gross distortion and contrary to what we know.”

U.S.-Pakistan Relations on a Razor’s Edge

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere.

A sober anniversary last month reminded us of the U.S. attack on Afghanistan that took place on Oct. 7, 2001, in the wake of 9/11. The consequences of that American invasion were severe for Afghanistan, but the impact also crossed the long border shared with Pakistan.

Both Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to stagger under the effects of an international conflict that extends back almost four decades. It is generally believed across the world that the Soviet Union triggered that conflict when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979. But we now know better, thanks to an admission in 1998 by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. Brzezinski said Afghanistan became a flashpoint when he and the then-president sent “freedom fighters” from Pakistan into Afghanistan to force the Soviets to defend the Afghan government. Gen. Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who ruled Pakistan at the time, went along with this scheme to break out of the isolation he found himself in after he ordered the hanging of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Today, Pakistan and the U.S. face a stalemate in Afghanistan. Since President Donald Trump announced his South Asian strategy in August 2017, relations between the two countries have cooled visibly. Trump’s strategic plan put new pressure on Pakistan to stop protecting terrorists on the Pakistani-Afghan border.

Islamabad denies that terrorists enjoy sanctuary in Pakistan. It claims militants causing devastation in Afghanistan and destabilizing that country have done so on the Afghan side of the border after they were driven out of Pakistan. But deadly incidents contradict that claim—just last month, a prominent Afghan police chief was assassinated by a young man who had trained with the Taliban in Pakistan.

In 2017, Pakistan began to build a fence on its 1,600-mile border with Afghanistan. The $532 million fence is expected to be completed next year. The Pakistan army claims this elaborate barrier will prevent terrorists from infiltrating the Durand Line, which has always been a porous border. But will it check infiltration? Skeptical observers doubt it because the border is dotted with tunnels that terrorists have used when border crossings became difficult.

A quick visit to the region by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in October 2017, as a follow-up to Trump’s August announcement, confirmed that all was not well between Washington and Islamabad. The two sides were courteous, but each maintained its stance. Tillerson presented Pakistan with a list of names of supposed terrorists, who were to be handed over to the American army. If Islamabad didn’t comply, it was to suffer undisclosed consequences. Pakistan, as usual, denied the existence of terrorist havens on its soil.

A key change in the geopolitical situation in this region occurred in mid-August of this year when a new government was installed in Islamabad (led by Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, or PTI), but that has not turned the tide of international politics in Southwest Asia.

A hectic round of diplomacy between Pakistan and the U.S. since the election has been counterproductive. In early September, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo made a five-hour stopover in Islamabad, which appears to have been a scouting mission to assess the PTI’s approach to strategic issues in the region. It does not appear that any progress resulted.

Last month, acting U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Henry Ensher told The Wilson Center in Washington his government would continue to pressure Pakistan to “change its policy toward regional peace and stability.”

Another exercise in diplomacy proved futile last month when Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was in the U.S. to attend a United Nations General Assembly session. His second meeting with Pompeo—this time at the White House—did not even produce a joint statement, so far apart were the two sides in their views on the region.

The deadlock is rooted in the two countries’ differing perceptions of Afghanistan and India. Washington wants to make India the key regional player in the Great Afghanistan Game. The U.S. has forged close economic relations with New Delhi in recent years, and Trump has called on India to reciprocate by supporting the pro-American Ashraf Ghani administration in Kabul. (The U.S. helped facilitate Ghani’s election.) Washington wants Pakistan to help sustain the status quo and to stop competing for influence in Afghanistan.

The U.S. also wants to revive trust between Islamabad and Washington by implementing all military agreements between the two countries signed in the post-9/11 years. Those agreements have centered on eliminating terrorists in Afghanistan.

The demands Washington is making run counter to the strategic aims of the Pakistan army, which has the final word in policy matters. The ruling PTI—which has benefited from support of the military—hardly has any leverage in the situation.

For its part, Pakistan wants the U.S. to focus on New Delhi-Islamabad relations and to promote détente between India and Pakistan, both of which are armed with nuclear weapons. India has been considered Pakistan’s Enemy Number One since the two South Asian neighbors emerged as independent states in 1947, but many Pakistanis have not agreed with this policy, deeming it unwise and dangerous for their country’s survival. Until recently, there have been periods of stability and near-détente, and the U.S. has helped by adopting a policy of mediation and conciliation on India-Pakistan issues.

Peaceful relations with India would enable Pakistan to focus fully on its western front, which is the main theater of war against the terrorists in Afghanistan.

With no understanding reached on several regional issues, the stalemate continues. To quote Pompeo, the objective of “resetting” the direction of U.S.-Pakistan relations has not been achieved.

Looming Economic Crisis

Islamabad has to find a way out of this crisis by strengthening its hand with regard to security and the economy.

For decades, Islamabad has found strength through strategic links with Washington, including the arms aid it has received for its military operations. Since the 1950s, it has also received massive economic assistance from the U.S., although critics say injudicious use of those funds has made Pakistan overwhelmingly dependent on foreign aid. Much of the money went for projects that never became functional because they were inappropriate for Pakistan’s conditions, while a lot of money in “tied” aid went back to the donor country. (Under the conditions of tied aid, the country that receives funds must spend that money on goods from the donor country.) Newsweek reports that some funding may even have been embezzled.

Getting out of the debt trap isn’t easy, with an economic crisis staring the country in the face. As on 21 previous occasions, the government in Islamabad is approaching the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout. An IMF mission is visiting Islamabad this week.

The PTI government also has been seeking economic aid from allies, notably Saudi Arabia and China. Prime Minister Imran Khan managed to get a bailout of $6 billion from Riyadh at the Future Investment Initiative last month. He has also visited Beijing. and China has assured him it will help Pakistan in its present crisis but shrewdly has not announced any details, leaving those for future negotiations. The Chinese likely are waiting to see the outcome of the IMF talks.

Since 2013, China has emerged as Pakistan’s biggest economic partner. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is an integral part of Beijing’s One Belt, One Road initiative, which will open shorter overland and sea routes to enhance China’s connections with the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

To ward off criticism from several quarters, the Chinese declared recently that CPEC was not the cause of Pakistan’s current economic malaise. That is true. Every Pakistani government since the 1950s has contributed to the country’s debt burden by borrowing millions of dollars from the West and the IMF. But what’s also true is that when the repayment of the $50 billion in CPEC-related loans begins in 2023, the crisis will escalate. Topline Securities, a brokerage house that analyzes CPEC-related finances, estimates Pakistan’s debt to China will balloon to $90 billion in the 30-year repayment period.

The basic fact is that Pakistan’s failure to live within its means has brought its economy to the brink. Its biggest expenditure has been on defense, which has limited its capacity to improve human resources. Conditions imposed by Pakistan’s creditors has restricted its options in every walk of life because much of the aid has been earmarked for military equipment and unfeasible civic projects.

Military Security at Stake

To bolster the country in terms of military security, Pakistani policymakers have turned to states that compete with the U.S. in the global race for strategic supremacy. Pakistan has been closely involved in military exercises with China on a regular basis since 2004, claiming they promote peace and reinforce the preparedness of Pakistan’s defense forces. That is nothing new—the two countries have had close defense ties since the 1960s.

Russia has not been a stranger, either. True, a long period of Pakistan-U.S. military alignment alienated Russia from Pakistan. But didn’t someone say that there are no permanent friends or foes in international affairs? Russia and Pakistan have seen periods of amity as well.

In 2014 Islamabad signed a defense cooperation pact with Moscow, when global politics appeared to be reverting to an erstwhile confrontational pattern. Since then, Russia and Pakistan have held three military drills to strengthen cooperation and exchange expertise on counterterrorism. The third drill, dubbed Druzhba-III, ended last month. If nothing else, these exercises amount to a show of strength and a warning that the U.S. should not expect an easy victory if it confronts Pakistan.

Pakistan has also held war games with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. Apart from military benefits, these exercises show that Pakistan is not isolated. However, this regional involvement has dragged the government into disputes that it has long sought to avoid. For example, Gen. Raheel Sharif, Pakistan’s retiring chief of army staff, was appointed commander in chief of the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition (formerly the Islamic Military Alliance). The appointment was made by the Saudi government with the approval of the Pakistan defense minister, although Pakistan’s National Assembly voted against it. Public opinion in Pakistan strongly disapproves of the government’s involvement in Saudi conflicts in the region.

Pakistan’s economic and security challenges are daunting. With China’s support, short-term solutions are being found, although in the long run Islamabad’s woes will become direr than ever. Trump’s inability to take a multidimensional view of the region, especially of the India-Pakistan conflict, will destabilize the region further. This area is home to two states with nuclear arms, and even a skirmish could trigger a devastating war.

Is America in a Full-Blown Constitutional Crisis?

After President Donald Trump tore through a “red line” on Wednesday by immediately replacing fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions with Matthew Whitaker—a fervent loyalist who has openly called for the defunding of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe—lawmakers, legal experts, and progressive analysts argued that Trump’s presidency has now entered “a dangerous new phase” that many described as a full-blown Constitutional crisis.

Just hours after this move, the Trump administration stripped the press credentials of well-known White House journalist in a move that was denounced as a “clear attack on the First Amendment.”

“In less than 24 hours after the midterms, Trump has already: 1) Ousted Sessions, installing a lackey at the Justice department. 2) Berated the press. 3) Attacked House Democrats,” University of California at Berkeley professor Robert Reich noted in a tweet on Wednesday. “We are entering a dangerous new phase of his presidency.”

In less than 24 hours after the midterms, Trump has already:

1) Ousted Sessions, installing a lackey at the Justice department.

2) Berated the press.

3) Attacked House Democrats.

We are entering a dangerous new phase of his presidency.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) November 7, 2018

Coming just hours after Democrats retook the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections and gained the power to launch investigations into White House corruption, Trump’s decision to oust Sessions triggered massive nationwide protests—which will take place on Thursday at 5 PM local time—and sparked urgent warnings that Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein could be fired next.

Intensifying these warnings was Trump’s move to appoint an open critic of Mueller’s probe as acting Attorney General. This decision, legal experts were quick to note, automatically removed Rosenstein from his oversight role and placed Whitaker in charge of the Mueller investigation.

As the New York Times observed, it will now be up to Whitaker to decide whether to hand over Mueller’s final report on his findings to Congress—or keep it secret and hidden from the public.

“There is really no other way to spin it: This is a cover-up and a Constitutional crisis,” argued Judd Legum, author of the Popular Information newsletter.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who is set to become chair of the House Judiciary Committee next year, declared in a statement on Wednesday that “this is a constitutionally perilous moment for our country and the president” and warned the White House to not destroy any evidence related to Sessions’ firing.

Other Democratic lawmakers expressed similar alarm and demanded that Mueller’s probe remain free from White House meddling:

.@realDonaldTrump’s firing of Jeff Sessions brings us one step closer to a constitutional crisis. Congress must act to ensure that Special Counsel Mueller can do his job without interference.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) November 7, 2018

Sessions faithfully carried out Trump’s extremist agenda. Yet Trump fired him before all the midterm ballots have been counted. If Trump tries to fire Deputy AG Rosenstein next, it will trigger a constitutional crisis. Now more than ever we must protect Special Counsel Mueller.

— Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) November 7, 2018

Countering the Democrats’ warnings of an imminent Constitutional crisis, independent investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler concluded, “I don’t think Dems in Congress understand that the constitutional crisis is already here.”

Behind Pentagon Efforts to Rewrite the Vietnam War

Here’s a paradox of the last few decades: as American military power has been less and less effective in achieving Washington’s goals, the rhetoric surrounding that power has grown more and more boastful.

The cliché that our armed forces are the best and mightiest in the world — even if the U.S. military hasn’t won any of its significant wars in the last 50 years — resonates in President Trump’s promise to make America great again. Many Americans, clearly including him, associate that slogan with military power. And we don’t just want to be greater again in the future; we also want to have been greater in the past than we really were. To that end, we regularly forget some facts and invent others that will make our history more comfortable to remember.

The Vietnam War was obviously one of the most disastrous of this country’s past mistakes — and the Pentagon’s “50th Vietnam War commemoration” is a near-perfect example of how both national and military leaders and a willing public have avoided facing important truths about Vietnam and American wars ever since. That’s not just a matter of inaccurate storytelling. It’s dangerous because refusing to recognize past mistakes makes it easier to commit future ones. For that reason, the selective history the Pentagon has been putting out on Vietnam for more than six years, and what that story tells us about the military leadership’s institutional memory, is worth a critical look.

The commemoration website’s historical material — principally a set of fact sheets and an extensive “interactive timeline” — is laced with factual mistakes, errors of both omission and commission. Its history drastically minimizes or more often completely ignores facts that reveal America’s policy and moral failures, its missteps on the ground, and its complicity (along with the enemy’s) in massive civilian suffering not just in Vietnam but in Laos and Cambodia, too. Opposition to the war at home is largely scrubbed out of the record as well.

Perhaps more telling than the misstatements has been the prolonged failure to correct faulty entries that have remained unchanged for years even though the site’s administrators were well aware of them.

Back in 2014, following a critical TomDispatch article by Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, and pressure from other critics, officials did revise a few items. Those included the My Lai massacre (though the site still does not use the word “massacre” for the murder by U.S. troops of more than 500 civilians, including women and children) and the naval clashes in the Tonkin Gulf that led to the first U.S. air strikes on North Vietnam. But no more corrections followed, leaving a startling range of wrong or misleading statements untouched.

In its most noticeable distortion, the site virtually ignores the domestic debate on the war and the divisions it caused in American society. As of this writing, the 30-year (1945-1975) timeline still includes only terse one-line entries for each of the massive national antiwar protests of October and November 1969. The wave of demonstrations in May 1970 following the U.S. “incursion” in Cambodia gets a somewhat more detailed entry, mentioning the deaths of protesters killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio and by police gunfire at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

Aside from those, though, most other important moments in the peace movement are missing from the timeline altogether. The massive 1965and 1967 protest marches outside the Pentagon are nowhere mentioned. Nor are the chaotic protests the following year outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Although the Vietnam veterans’ experience is billed as the central theme of the commemoration, veterans who came to oppose the war were also blanked out of its story until just days ago, when officials at the commemoration’s History and Legacy branch learned that I was working on the present article. Only then did the site managers insert a new entry on the dramatic week-long protest in April 1971, when hundreds of disillusioned vets threw away their decorations in front of the U.S. Capitol — an event previously not mentioned in the timeline at all.

The new entry, along with briefly describing the veterans’ protests, refers to future secretary of state and presidential candidate John Kerry’s televised testimony that week before a Senate committee. However, it does not mention the moment that most historians would describe as the most memorable in that hearing, when Kerry, wearing Navy fatigues with his Vietnam ribbons pinned above his shirt pocket, asked the committee members, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Even if the veterans’ demonstration and some other notable gaps have been belatedly corrected, they are still worth noting because they illustrate the nature of the message the site has been putting out for the last five or six years, and the underlying attitude that has let acknowledged mistakes go uncorrected for half or more of that time.

Errors of Commission…

Along with misleading omissions, the commemoration site also contains direct misstatements of historical fact that have not been corrected even though site officials have been aware of them for at least a year, or possibly longer.

Examples include a pair of falsehoods that, with symbolic symmetry, distort historical reality at opposite ends of America’s Vietnam involvement. One falsifies a key issue at an early turn on the U.S. path toward involvement in that war, while the other misrepresents an important turning point in its very last stage.

The first false statement is in the U.S. Army fact sheet — there is one for each military service — which says in its opening paragraph, “The Geneva Accords of July 1954 divided Vietnam into a Communist state in the North and an anti-Communist state in the South.”

That is wrong. On the contrary, rather than creating two states, the Geneva agreements, which ended hostilities in France’s failed effort to maintain colonial rule in Indochina, definitively recognized Vietnam as a single nation. The line it established between South and North was defined as a “provisional military demarcation line” temporarily separating the opposing French and Viet Minh armed forces, pending national elections for a unified government. The Geneva Conference’s final declaration explicitly stated that the ceasefire line “should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.”

That is not a minor technicality. It misleads on a fundamental question: What was the war about? Was it illegal foreign aggression by North Vietnam against the South, as the United States and the South Vietnamese government in Saigon — neither of which signed the Geneva treaty — insisted? Or was it a war to reunify an illegally divided country, as the Communist side proclaimed? There are arguments to be made on both sides of that question, but the Geneva accords did not support Washington’s legal and political justification for intervening — and wrongly indicating that it did gives the U.S. claim an uncontested legitimacy it simply did not have.

The second example comes from a passage in the Air Force fact sheet on the December 1972 U.S. air offensive commonly remembered as the “Christmas bombing.”

Using its codename, Linebacker, the fact sheet describes events this way: “As [peace] talks dragged on, President Nixon ordered a second Linebacker operation and in late December 1972, B-52s struck Hanoi and Haiphong at night and A-7s and F-4s struck during the day… The North Vietnamese, now defenseless, returned to negotiations and quickly concluded a settlement. American airpower therefore played a decisive role in ending the long conflict.”

Like the Army’s statement on Geneva, that is false. The December bombing brought no significant new concessions from North Vietnam. The peace agreement signed by Hanoi’s representatives in January 1973 was, in every meaningful respect, identical to the draft treaty they had already accepted in October 1972, months before the bombing.

That earlier , which differed from the January agreement only on a few minor procedural points, was not a negotiating proposal or a loose agreement in principle. It was a definitive final draft approved down to the last detail by both sides and was not carried out only because the United States withdrew its commitment after South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu, whose government had not participated in the negotiations, rejected its terms. Under strong U.S. pressure, Thieu accepted essentially the same agreement in January. So it was Saigon, not Hanoi, that changed its position after the bombing.

That’s a meaningful mistake, too. It mischaracterizes a critical event in the negotiations that ended the U.S. war, and then cites that erroneous history to falsely claim that air power played a decisive role.

…and of Omission

Until the most recent changes spurred by my inquiry, some crucial historical events were missing from the timeline. Although a few of those blank spots have now been nominally filled, several of the revised entries still lack meaningful details.

One notable omission was the March 1970 coup in Cambodia that overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk, toppled Cambodia into full-scale war, and set the stage for U.S. troops to enter the country just six weeks later. Another was South Vietnam’s only authentic national election in September 1967, when General Nguyen Van Thieu became president with slightly more than one-third of the votes. An entry on that election was inserted in one of those late amendments to the timeline, but it still says nothing about the surprise second-place candidate, Truong Dinh Dzu, who ran on a peace platform, was arrested soon after the election and imprisoned for the next five years — tarnishing claims that the United States was supporting a legitimate democracy in South Vietnam.

Another gap only partially filled after all these years by the newly amended timeline has to do with the intensive and highly controversial U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1973, conducted for nearly six months after the Paris peace agreement ended U.S. combat in Vietnam.

Replacing a single oblique reference in the earlier entry, which had merely noted that the U.S. Congress ended funding in August 1973 for “air action in Cambodia and Laos” but said nothing else about that campaign, the timeline now specifies where and when the bombing took place. However, it still gives no details about the scale and severity of those air strikes. (Two hundred and fifty thousand tons of U.S. bombs fell on Cambodia in 1973, more than were dropped on Japan in all of World War II.)  Nor does it offer any hint that the bombing did not end Cambodia’s agony. The timeline mentions Cambodia just once more, in a one-sentence entry on its final page saying only, “On April 16 and 17 [1975], Phnom Penh falls to the communist forces, the Khmer Rouge.”

Omissions extend even to the dates that were chosen for the 50th “anniversary” (if that word can be used to designate a span of more than 13 years). Rather than marking any events in the actual Vietnam War, the commemoration officially runs between two U.S. holidays — from Memorial Day in 2012 until Veterans Day in 2025.

A beginning date for the Vietnam War is indeed hard to pin down, but there were perfectly clear choices for its end: January 27, 1973, when U.S. combat ended under the Paris peace agreement; March 29, 1973, when the last American war prisoners were released and the last U.S. combat troops departed; or April 30, 1975, when Saigon surrendered to the Communists. By not choosing any of those, the Pentagon spared veterans and the rest of us from the possible discomfort of noticing the real dates and remembering the great national failure they represent.

Changes Promised, But Unmade

Pentagon commemoration officials have long acknowledged serious shortcomings in the timeline. As far back as March 2015, administrators informed a group of the site’s critics that sooner or later they planned to replace it with a brand-new timeline giving a more accurate and balanced version of events in Vietnam.

The following January, retired Army Colonel Mark Franklin, chief of the commemoration’s History and Legacy Branch, told historians at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting that the updated timeline would be posted “soon.” He even showed slides from what was to be the new version. But nothing on the site had changed in the fall of 2017, many months later, when I contacted his office before writing an earlier article on the commemoration. I was told then that a completely revised website, including a brand-new timeline, was expected to be posted by the end of that year. If that didn’t happen, the plan was to go ahead with corrections in the existing timeline.

Almost exactly a year later, the site has still not been replaced and the revised timeline, prepared several years ago, remains in limbo. The official explanation for the delay is that unresolved contracting issues have kept work on the new site from starting. Franklin has emphatically denied that there has been a deliberate attempt to cling to faulty history or any intent to “portray one particular narrative about the war.” But keeping drastically whitewashed history on the site for so many years after promising to change it does not exactly suggest a strong commitment to provide “historically accuratematerials,” as promised on the History and Legacy section’s home page, to help Americans understand their country’s experience in Vietnam.

Mythologizing Our Wars and Ourselves

The commemoration not only tells us something about the Pentagon’s custodians of our Vietnam War memories, it also reveals something much broader and deeper in American political and popular culture: a powerful need to think of ourselves as a righteous, just, and successful country that fights only righteous, just, and successful wars.

This is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon. As far back as 1899, in a speech defending the military campaign that would make the Philippines a U.S. colony, President William McKinley assured his audience that it was not a war for treasure or conquest because such wars were foreign to the American character. “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind,” McKinley declared. “They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose.” The “sole purpose” of sending U.S. troops to the Philippines, he went on, was “the welfare and happiness and the rights of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands.” As chronicled in Stephen Kinzer’s fascinating 2017 book, The True Flag, that same note was struck in many orations at the time — speeches that perfectly expressed what more than a century later would be called “American exceptionalism.”

Along with nurturing a broad national assumption of moral superiority, for a generation American political leaders have shored up U.S. military ventures with rhetoric that conflates “support the troops” with “support the policy.” A variant of that formula that has been retroactively applied to Vietnam equates “honor the veterans” with “honor the war,” the clear implication being that criticizing the war is indeed disrespecting those veterans. It’s false logic, but looking at the Pentagon commemoration site, it’s impossible not to see its influence there.

The commemoration’s most recent corrections are a welcome but small step toward greater accuracy. But the site is still far from showing the true nature of what this country really did to itself and to many millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians in the tragic mistake we call the Vietnam War. For that, far greater changes will be needed than have been made so far.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 85, Hospitalized After Taking Fall

WASHINGTON — Eighty-five-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg fractured three ribs in a fall in her office at the Supreme Court and is in the hospital, the court said Thursday.

The court’s oldest justice fell Wednesday evening, the court said. She went to George Washington University Hospital in Washington early Thursday after experiencing discomfort overnight.

She was admitted to the hospital for treatment and observation after tests showed she fractured three ribs.

In her absence, the court was going ahead Thursday with a courtroom ceremony welcoming new Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the court last month. President Donald Trump and new acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker were expected to attend.

Ginsburg has had a series of health problems. She broke two ribs in a fall in 2012. She has had two prior bouts with cancer and had a stent implanted to open a blocked artery in 2014. She also was hospitalized after a bad reaction to medicine in 2009.

Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg rebuffed suggestions from some liberals that she should step down in the first two years of President Barack Obama’s second term, when Democrats also controlled the Senate and would have been likely to confirm her successor.

She already has hired clerks for the term that extends into 2020, indicating she has no plans to retire.

Ginsburg leads the court’s liberal wing.

13 Dead Including Gunman in Shooting at California Bar

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — A hooded gunman wearing all black opened fire at a country dance bar holding a weekly “college night” in Southern California, using a handgun and a smoke device to kill 12 people and sending hundreds fleeing, authorities said Thursday.

Terrified revelers used barstools to break second-floor windows and jump to safety to escape the dance bar, where the gunman was later found dead. Those killed in the shooting Wednesday night also included 11 people inside the bar and a sheriff’s sergeant who was the first officer inside the door, Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean said.

“It’s a horrific scene in there,” Dean told a news conference in the parking lot of the Borderline Bar & Grill. “There’s blood everywhere.”

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that authorities have identified the gunman. The official said the 29-year-old man deployed a smoke device and used a .45-caliber handgun when he opened fire. The official was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

The massacre was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since 17 classmates and teachers were gunned down at a Parkland, Florida, school nine months ago. It also came less than two weeks after a gunman killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. That, in turn, closely followed the series of pipe bombs mailed to prominent Democrats, CNN and former officials critical of President Donald Trump.

 

Trump said Thursday on Twitter that he has been “fully briefed on the terrible shooting.” He praised law enforcement, saying “Great bravery shown by police” and said, “God bless all of the victims and families of the victims.”

The gunman at the dance bar was tall and wearing all black with a hood and his face partly covered, witnesses told TV stations at the scene. He first fired on a person working the door, then appeared to open fire at random at the people inside, they said.

Many more people had minor injuries, including some that came from their attempt to flee, Dean said.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Helus and a passing highway patrolman were responding to several 911 calls when they arrived at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks at about 11:20 p.m., the sheriff said. They heard gunfire and went inside.

Helus was immediately hit with multiple gunshots, Dean said. The highway patrolman cleared the perimeter and pulled Helus out, and then waited as a SWAT team and scores more officers arrived. Helus died early Thursday at a hospital.

By the time they entered the bar again, the gunfire had stopped. They found 12 people dead inside, including the gunman. It’s not yet clear how the gunman died, Dean said.

The shooting happened on college night. Two-step lessons in country dancing were being offered Wednesday at the Borderline, according to its website.

The bar, which includes a large dance hall with a stage and a pool room along with several smaller areas for eating and drinking, is a popular hangout for students from nearby California Lutheran University who enjoy country music. It’s also close to several other universities, including California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo, Pepperdine University in Malibu and Moorpark College in Moorpark.

When the gunman entered, people screamed and fled to all corners of the bar, while a few people threw barstools through the windows and helped dozens to escape, witnesses said.

Video from the scene accessed by The Associated Press is punctuated by loud sounds of several rounds of gunfire. A terrified witness runs out. Police cars are seen arriving and an armed officer takes up position outside the bar. Three men rush out carrying a bloodied fourth individual. They try to stem the bleeding of what appears to be a gunshot wound.

Cole Knapp, a freshman at Moorpark College, said he was inside the bar when the shooting began but thought at first that it was “just someone with an M-80, just kind of playing a prank.”

Then he said he saw the shooter, wearing a black beanie and black hoodie and holding a small caliber handgun.

“I tried to get as many people to cover as I could,” Knapp said. “There was an exit right next to me, so I went through that. That exit leads to a patio where people smoke. People out there didn’t really know what was going on. There’s a fence right there, so I said, ’Everyone get over the fence as quickly as you can, and I followed them over.”

He said a highway patrol officer was nearby who just happened to be pulling someone over.

“I screamed to him, ‘There’s a shooter in there!’ He was kind of in disbelief, then saw that I was serious.”

Knapp said he has friends who haven’t been accounted for.

Tayler Whitler, 19, said she was on the dance floor with her friends nearby when she saw the gunman shooting and heard screams to “get down.”

“It was really, really, really shocking,” Whitler told KABC-TV as she stood with her father in the Borderline parking lot. “It looked like he knew what he was doing.”

Sarah Rose DeSon told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that she saw the shooter draw his gun.

“I dropped to the floor,” she said. “A friend yelled ‘Everybody down!’ We were hiding behind tables trying to keep ourselves covered.”

Shootings of any kind are very rare in Thousand Oaks, a city of about 130,000 people about 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of Los Angeles, just across the county line.

Helus was a 29-year veteran of the force with a wife and son and planned to retire in the coming year, said the sheriff, who choked back tears several times as he talked about the sergeant who was also his longtime friend.

“Ron was a hardworking, dedicated sheriff’s sergeant who was totally committed,” Dean said, “and tonight, as I told his wife, he died a hero because he went in to save lives.”