Chris Hedges's Blog, page 434

Is Facebook Systematically Censoring Alternative Media?

This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel Blevins.

Facebook claimed that these pages had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”

In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge — and promised more takedowns in the near future.

“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the influential think tank the German Marshall Fund, which is funded by the U.S. government and NATO. “They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning.”

Fly went on to complain that “all you need is an email” to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance.

Fly made these stunning comments to Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting faculty member in sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and co-author of this article. The two spoke during a lunch break at a conference on Asian security organized by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, Germany.

In the tweet below, Fly is the third person from the left who appears seated at the table.

A rare opportunity to discuss Asian security in Berlin, with an excellent group of experts from the region @SWPBerlin pic.twitter.com/Ogdc9d5BVK

— Garima Mohan (@GarimaMo) October 15, 2018

The remarks by Fly — “we are just starting to push back” — seemed to confirm the worst fears of the alternative online media community. If he was to be believed, the latest purge was motivated by politics, not spam prevention, and was driven by powerful interests hostile to dissident views, particularly where American state violence is concerned.

Jamie Fly, Rise of a Neocon Cadre

Jamie Fly is an influential foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last year lobbying for the censorship of “fringe views” on social media. Over the years, he has advocated for a military assault on Iran, a regime change war on Syria, and hiking military spending to unprecedented levels. He is the embodiment of a neoconservative cadre.

Like so many second-generation neocons, Fly entered government by burrowing into mid-level positions in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and Department of Defense.

In 2009, he was appointed director of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a rebranded version of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, or PNAC. The latter outfit was an umbrella group of neoconservative activists that first made the case for an invasion of Iraq as part of a wider project of regime change in countries that resisted Washington’s sphere of influence.

By 2011, Fly was advancing the next phase in PNAC’s blueprint by clamoring for military strikes on Iran. “More diplomacy is not an adequate response,” he argued. A year later, Fly urged the US to “expand its list of targets beyond the [Iranian] nuclear program to key command and control elements of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with other key government officials.”

Fly soon found his way into the senate office of Marco Rubio, a neoconservative pet project, assuming a role as his top foreign policy advisor. Amongst other interventionist initiatives, Rubio has taken the lead in promoting harsh economic sanctions targeting Venezuela, even advocating for a U.S. military assault on the country. When Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign floundered amid a mass revolt of the Republican Party’s middle American base against the party establishment, Fly was forced to cast about for new opportunities.

He found them in the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate that formed soon after Donald Trump’s shock election victory.

PropOrNot Sparks the Alternative Media Panic

A journalistic insider’s account of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Shattered, revealed that “in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the following day, according to the book, “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

Less than three weeks after Clinton’s defeat, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg published a dubiously sourced report headlined, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news.’” The article hyped up a McCarthyite effort by a shadowy, anonymously run organization called PropOrNot to blacklist some 200 American media outlets as Russian “online propaganda.”

The alternative media outfits on the PropOrNot blacklist included some of those recently purged by Facebook and Twitter, such as The Free Thought Project and Anti-Media. Among the criteria PropOrNot identified as signs of Russian propaganda were “Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone” and “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian resistance to Assad.” PropOrNot called for “formal investigations by the U.S. government” into the outlets it had blacklisted.

According to Craig Timberg, the Washington Post correspondent who uncritically promoted the media suppression initiative, Propornot was established by “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Timberg quoted a figure associated with the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report he wrote with his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.

Timberg’s piece on PropOrNot was promoted widely by former top Clinton staffers and celebrated by ex-Obama White House aide Dan Pfeiffer as “the biggest story in the world.” But after a wave of stinging criticism, including in the pages of the New Yorker, the article was amended with an editor’s note stating, “The [Washington] Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”

PropOrNot had been seemingly exposed as a McCarthyite sham, but the concept behind it — exposing online American media outlets as vehicles for Kremlin “active measures” — continued to flourish.

The Birth of the Russian Bot Tracker — With U.S. Government Money

By August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the blue, this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign policy hands and neocon Never Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how supposed Russian Twitter bots were infecting American political discourse with divisive narratives. It featured a daily “Hamilton 68” online dashboard that highlighted the supposed bot activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site avoided naming any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be tracking.

The initiative was immediately endorsed by John Podesta, the founder of the Democratic Party think tank the Center for American Progress, and former chief of staff of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s chief Russiagate correspondent, promoted the bot tracker as “a very cool tool.”

Unlike PropOrNot, the ASD was sponsored by one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, the German Marshall Fund, which had been founded in 1972 to nurture the special relationship between the US and what was then West Germany.

The German Marshall Fund is substantially funded by Western governments, and largely reflects their foreign-policy interests. Its top two financial sponsors, at more than $1 million per year each, are the U.S. government’s soft-power arm the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the German Foreign Office (known in German as the Auswärtiges Amt). The U.S. State Department also provides more than half a million dollars per year, as do the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development and the foreign affairs ministries of Sweden and Norway. It likewise receives at least a quarter of a million dollars per year from NATO.

The US government and NATO are top donors to the German Marshall Fund

Though the German Marshall Fund did not name the donors that specifically sponsored its Alliance for Securing Democracy initiative, it hosts a who’s who of bipartisan national-security hardliners on the ASD’s advisory council, providing the endeavor with the patina of credibility. They range from neocon movement icon Bill Kristol to former Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan and ex-CIA director Michael Morell.

Jamie Fly, a German Marshall Fund fellow and Asia specialist, emerged as one of the most prolific promoters of the new Russian bot tracker in the media. Together with Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in a series of interviews and co-authored several op-eds emphasizing the need for a massive social media crackdown.

During a March 2018 interview on C-Span, Fly complained that “Russian accounts” were “trying to promote certain messages, amplify certain content, raise fringe views, pit Americans against each other, and we need to deal with this ongoing problem and find ways through the government, through tech companies, through broader society to tackle this issue.”

Yet few of the sites on PropOrNot’s blacklist, and none of the alternative sites that were erased in the recent Facebook purge that Fly and his colleagues take apparent credit for, were Russian accounts. Perhaps the only infraction they could have been accused of was publishing views that Fly and his cohorts saw as “fringe.”

What’s more, the ASD has been forced to admit that the mass of Twitter accounts it initially identified as “Russian bots” were not necessarily bots — and may not have been Russian either.

“I’m Not Convinced on This Bot Thing”

A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal, a co-author of this article, found that the ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American national security apparatus.”

These figures included the same George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security fellows — Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts — that were cited as experts in the Washington Post’s article promoting PropOrNot.

Weisburd, who has been described as one of the brains behind the Hamilton 68 dashboard, once maintained a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone he considered “anti-American.” More recently, he has taken to Twitter to spout off murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of the Intercept — a publication the ASD flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence operations.

Watts, for his part, has testified before Congress on several occasions to call on the government to “quell information rebellions” with censorious measures including “nutritional labels” for online media. He has received fawning publicity from corporate media and been rewarded with a contributor role for NBC on the basis of his supposed expertise in ferreting out Russian disinformation.

Clint Watts has urged Congress to “quell information rebellions”

However, under questioning during a public event by Grayzone contributor Ilias Stathatos, Watts admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were false, and refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful claims about malicious Russian bot activity.

In a separate interview with Buzzfeed, Watts appeared to completely disown the Hamilton 68 bot tracker as a legitimate tool. “I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” Watts confessed. He even called the narrative that he helped manufacture “overdone,” and admitted that the accounts Hamilton 68 tracked were not necessarily directed by Russian intelligence actors.

“We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia,” Watts conceded.

But these stunning admissions did little to slow the momentum of the coming purge.

Enter the Atlantic Council

In his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Fund’s Fly stated that he was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign to purge alternative media from social media platforms like Facebook.

The Atlantic Council is another Washington-based think tank that serves as a gathering point for neoconservatives and liberal interventionists pushing military aggression around the globe. It is funded by NATO and repressive, US-allied governments including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as well as by Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor Pynchuk.

This May, Facebook announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation during elections around the world.”

The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is notorious for its zealous conflation of legitimate online dissent with illicit Russian activity, embracing the same tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.

Ben Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow who has built his reputation on flushing out online Kremlin influence networks, embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt this year that saw him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or Kremlin “influence accounts.” Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.

In an interview with Sky News, Shilling delivered a memorable tirade against his accusers. “I have no Kremlin contacts whatsoever; I do not know any Russians, I have no contact with the Russian government or anything to do with them,” he exclaimed. “I am an ordinary British citizen who happens to do research on the current neocon wars which are going on in Syria at this very moment.”

With the latest Facebook and Twitter purges, ordinary citizens like Shilling are being targeted in the open, and without apology. The mass deletions of alternative media accounts illustrate how national security hardliners from the German Marshall Fund and Atlantic Council (and whoever was behind PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the manufactured panic around Russian interference to generate public support for a wider campaign of media censorship.

In his conversation in Berlin with Sprague, Fly noted with apparent approval that, “Trump is now pointing to Chinese interference in the 2018 election.” As the mantra of foreign interference expands to a new adversarial power, the clampdown on voices of dissent in online media is almost certain to intensify.

As Fly promised, “This is just the beginning.”

There’s Something Suspicious Going On With Georgia’s Voting Machines

The Georgia governor’s race is in a deadlock, according to CNBC News, with Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp each polling at 47 percent as of Wednesday. In such a tight race, every vote will count, but voting rights advocates are raising the alarm over reports of voter suppression.

As Michael Harriot reports in The Root, the NAACP Georgia State Conference has filed complaints with the state Board of Elections over alleged voter suppression tactics. According to Harriot, voters have complained to the NAACP of multiple irregularities, including vote switching (usually from Democrat to Republican) and malfunctioning touchscreens.

Harriot writes that “NAACP Georgia State Conference president Phyllis T. Blake filed complaints with Georgia’s State Board [of] Elections after early voters and eyewitnesses in Bartow, Cobb, Henry, and Dodge County, Ga., notified the civil rights organization of the defective machines.”

Khyla Craine, the NAACP’s assistant general counsel, told The Root that “we’ve seen issues across the state of Georgia, and not just the Atlanta Metroplex. … We’ve seen this in central Georgia and have seen issues in southeastern Georgia, near Savannah.”

The machines are 17 years old and, as Harriot points out, Georgia “is one of five U.S. states whose voting machines have no paper trail, making them the most vulnerable to hacking, according to cybersecurity experts.”

Voting irregularities and potential voter suppression, however, are not limited to the machines:

Craine said that many Georgia voters who have requested or cast absentee ballots have been unable to track them using the Secretary of State’s “My Voter” page.

When a potential voter requests an absentee ballot, the voter is supposed to be able to enter their information on the Secretary of State’s website and see the status of their vote. Craine notes one specific incident in Candler County, Ga., where the county election official wasn’t even aware that they were supposed to input the information into the system.

All of this is “a very real threat” to election security, Robert DeMillo, a professor of computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and former chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard, told The Root.

The NAACP says this is not the first time Georgia’s voting laws have come under fire in recent weeks. As CNBC reports, voting rights advocates have already raised the alarm over Kemp’s decision (he’s also the Georgia secretary of state) to remove the names of more than 100,000 people who hadn’t voted in recent elections from the voter rolls, and to delay the registrations of an additional 53,000 people, mostly black people, because of his state’s “exact match” rule, which requires voter registration applications to match those of driver’s licenses or Social Security data.

While the Georgia NAACP awaits an answer to its complaint, it is continuing trainings on voting rights—with partner organization Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law—for community groups, poll workers and elected officials.

Read more at The Root.

Most Americans See Sharply Divided Nation, Poll Finds

WASHINGTON — With just two weeks to go until the critical midterm elections, an overwhelming majority of Americans say the United States is greatly divided, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. Few Americans believe those stark divisions will get better anytime soon.

The newly released survey found that more than 8 in 10 Americans think the country is greatly divided about important values. Just 20 percent of Americans say they think the country will become less divided over the next few years, and 39 percent think things will get worse. A strong majority of Americans, 77 percent, say they are dissatisfied with the state of politics in the country.

The poll was conducted Oct. 11-14 in the final sprint to the midterm elections, in which President Donald Trump has been rallying his supporters to turn out to vote in November. Overall, 59 percent of Americans disapprove of how Trump, a Republican, is handling his job as president, while 40 percent of Americans approve.

How Americans view Trump divides along partisan lines, according to the poll. While 83 percent of Republicans approve of how Trump is handling his job, 92 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of independents say they do not approve.

According to the poll, nearly half of Americans say they aren’t hearing enough from campaigns about the issues that matter most to them. Fifty-four percent of Democrats and 44 percent of Republicans say they are hearing too little about key issues.

Overall, top issues for Americans include health care, education, economic growth, Social Security and crime, each of which was called very important by at least three-quarters of Americans.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country, compared with 25 percent who say they are satisfied. But Americans are slightly more likely to be satisfied with the way things are going in their state or in their local community.

Majorities of Americans also say that they are dissatisfied with the gap between the rich and the poor, race relations and environmental conditions. But there are partisan splits. Eighty-three percent of Democrats are dissatisfied with the gap between the wealthy and the poor, compared with 43 percent of Republicans. Of environmental conditions, 75 percent of Democrats and 32 percent of Republicans say they are dissatisfied. And while 77 percent of Democrats say they’re dissatisfied with race relations, about 50 percent of Republicans say the same.

Democrats and Republicans also are divided on how important they consider each of those issues to be. About 8 in 10 Democrats but no more than a third of Republicans call income inequality, environmental issues or racism very important.

The past year has seen the United States reckon with accusations of sexual misconduct that ranged from inappropriate comments to rape and with a slew of high-profile men forced to resign or be fired. Overall, about 6 in 10 Americans said the issue of misconduct was important to them. But 73 percent of women said the issue was very important, compared with 51 percent of men. Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to call sexual misconduct important, 79 percent to 39 percent.

According to the poll, 43 percent of Americans somewhat or strongly disapprove of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court after a bruising confirmation fight that included allegations of excessive drinking and an accusation of sexual assault dating back to Kavanaugh’s teenage years. Thirty-five percent of Americans said they strongly or somewhat strongly approved of Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Overall, 59 percent of Americans said Supreme Court appointments are very important now, which is similar to the percentage who said that in 2016. But two years ago, Democrats and Republicans were more similar in how important they saw these nominations. Now, there is a 20 percentage point gap: 73 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans say Supreme Court appointments are very important to them.

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,152 adults was conducted Oct. 11-14 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Trump Administration to Send Hundreds of Troops to the Border

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is planning to dispatch 800 more troops to the border at the direction of a president who has declared illegal immigration a “national emergency” and has been stoking fears about it ahead of the fast-approaching midterms just as he did before his own election.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is expected to sign an order as early as Thursday sending 800 or more troops to the southern border to support the Border Patrol, according to a U.S. official. The official was not authorized to speak publicly because the details had not yet been finalized and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The order comes as thousands of Central American migrants continue their caravan trek through Mexico toward the hoped-for, but still far-distant U.S. border. Trump earlier Thursday tweeted that he was “bringing out the military” to stop those trying to enter the country and blamed Democrats for existing laws.

The additional troops are to provide what one official described as logistical support to the Border Patrol, including a variety of things such as vehicles, tents and equipment. There already are about 2,000 National Guard troops assisting at the border under a previous Pentagon arrangement. But the new troops would be active duty troops, not National Guard, the U.S. official said.

Trump, who was elected by stoking fears about immigrants, has been eager to make immigration a top issue heading into the midterm elections next month, which will determine which party controls Congress. Trump and senior White House officials have long believed the issue is key to turning out Trump’s ardent base of supporters. And Trump, at rallies and on Twitter, has tried to paint the Democrats as pro-illegal immigration, even claiming, with no evidence, that Democrats had organized and paid for the caravan, which remains more than 1,000 miles from the U.S. border.

The sprawling caravan of migrants —once estimated by the United Nations to be more than 7,000 strong — is hoping to make it to the United State. Most are Hondurans, seeking to escape the poverty and violence that plagues the region.

The caravan swelled dramatically soon after crossing the Mexican border on Oct. 19, but sickness, fear and police harassment have whittled down its numbers. Since entering Mexico at its southernmost tip, the group has advanced roughly 95 miles.

Trump earlier this year ordered the deployment of National Guard members to the U.S.-Mexico border to respond to a spike in illegal border crossing. But those members remain under the control of the governors of the states where they’re positioned, and their activities are limited to supportive roles, such as providing surveillance.

Federal law prohibits the use of active-duty service members for law enforcement inside the U.S. unless specifically authorized by Congress.

Trump had tweeted Monday that he’d alerted Border Patrol and the military that the caravan was “a National Emergy,” but the Pentagon said then that they’d received no new orders to provide troops for border security.

But Trump told a rally crowd in Wisconsin on Wednesday that moves were under way.

“Wait’ll you see what happens over the next couple of weeks. You’re going to see a very secure border. You just watch,” he told the crowd. “And the military is ready. They’re all set.”

Bernie Sanders Demands End to U.S. Complicity in Yemen Carnage

Anti-war voices are praising a new “must-read” New York Times op-ed in which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called on Congress “to redefine our relationship with Saudi Arabia, and to show that the Saudis do not have a blank check to continue violating human rights” by revoking U.S. support for the Saudi and UAE-led war in Yemen.

Noting that the humanitarian crisis in Yemen “has only worsened and our complicity become even greater” since the Senate voted in March to block a resolution (SJ Res. 54)—introduced by Sanders, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)—to end military support for the Saudis, Sanders wrote that he will bring the measure back to the floor next month.

“Amen!” tweeted CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin. “We have been in the Senate all week pushing for this bill. Join us.”

Amen! We have been in the Senate all week pushing for this bill. Join us https://t.co/1wl3nhOlVG

— Medea Benjamin (@medeabenjamin) October 25, 2018

Media critic Adam Johnson, an outspoken opponent of U.S. wars and imperialism, simply said, “this is good folks.”

Concluding that there are “so many excellent points in this op-ed” that she didn’t “even know where to begin,” Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watched tweeted, “Just read it.”

So many excellent points in this oped, dont even know where to begin. Just read it. War creating very problem administration claims it wants to solve; undermining broader effort against violent extremists; it’s a strategic/moral disaster for US @SenSanders https://t.co/a7yoE7HkyE

— Laura Pitter (@Laurapitter) October 25, 2018

As Sanders stated in his op-ed, “The likely assassination of the Saudi critic and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi underscores how urgent it has become” to immediately cease American complicity in the Saudi assault on Yemen, which has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Since Khashoggi disappeared, Sanders and many others have urged the Trump administration to “reevaluate” the U.S. relationship with the kingdom.

In addition to denouncing the “brutal murder” of Khashoggi, Sanders detailed how “the United States is deeply engaged in this war” in Yemen, and how it is “a strategic and moral disaster for the United States.” Specifically, he pointed out that “we are providing bombs the Saudi-led coalition is using, we are refueling their planes before they drop those bombs, and we are assisting with intelligence.”

While the Trump administration has defended U.S. involvement—even as the coalition has dropped American-made bombs on schoolchildren—the bombing campaign has killed, wounded, and displaced thousands of civilians, and created a hunger crisis that the U.N. recently warned could cause 13 million people to starve to death.

As the Times published the senator’s op-ed on Wednesday, Saudi airstrikes reportedly killed 21 people in Hodeidah, where civilian deaths have “surged dramatically” since June, when the Saudi-led coalition launched an offensive to take control of the port city.

Death toll rises to 21 people and 10 others wounded in a masscare committed today by Saudi airstrikes on a local market in al-Masoudi area of Bait al-Faqieh district in #Hodeidah. #Yemen

I know this place well & I didn’t expect that Saudi jets will hit hat area #peace4Yemen pic.twitter.com/Na0tqKbQK1

— Fatik Al-Rodaini (@Fatikr) October 24, 2018

As Sanders plans to bring his resolution back to the floor, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—who also wrote an op-ed about ending U.S. support for the war, published by the San Francisco Chronicle last week—is leading a similar effort in the House of Representatives.

“Not only has this war created a humanitarian disaster in one of the world’s poorest countries, but also American involvement in this war has not been authorized by Congress and is therefore unconstitutional,” Sanders concluded. “I very much hope that Congress will act, that we will finally take seriously our congressional duty, end our support for the carnage in Yemen, and send the message that human lives are worth more than profits for arms manufacturers.”

Megyn Kelly Absent From Show Following Blackface Comments

NEW YORK — Megyn Kelly was absent from her NBC News morning show on Thursday following this week’s controversy over her comments about blackface, amid indications that her time at the network could be ending after less than two years.

An NBC spokeswoman said that “given the circumstances,” the network was airing repeats of “Megyn Kelly Today” on Thursday and Friday.

During a segment about Halloween costumes on Tuesday, Kelly defended the use of blackface while discussing a character on “Real Housewives of New York City” who darkened her face for a Diana Ross costume. She said it was acceptable when she was a kid when portraying a character.

Social media condemnation was swift, and Kelly apologized to fellow NBC staffers in an email later in the day. Yet both NBC’s “Nightly News” and the “Today” show did stories on their colleague’s comment. Al Roker said “she owes a big apology to people of color across the country.”

She opened Wednesday’s show by saying she was wrong and sorry for what she said.

“I have never been a PC kind of person, but I do understand the value of being sensitive to our history, particularly on race and ethnicity,” she said.

The reference to political correctness in a discussion about blackface struck some critics as odd, along with the show’s cameras panning over the audience giving her a standing ovation for nearly 20 seconds.

Kelly jumped from Fox News Channel to NBC in early 2017, but it hasn’t been a comfortable fit. Her one-hour morning show has never caught on with viewers, except for a brief bump when she aggressively covered reports about sexual misconduct, and Kelly was said to be unhappy with the amount of lighter material expected of a 9 a.m. show.

Kelly did not respond to an email request seeking comment.

She met with NBC executives within the past month about dissatisfaction with the show’s direction, according to a person close to Kelly who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss personnel matters.

Kelly last month publicly called for NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack to appoint outside investigators to look into why the network didn’t air Ronan Farrow’s stories about disgraced Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein and allowed him to take the material to the New Yorker. That’s a particular sore point with NBC’s management.

She was also unhappy that accounts of Lack criticizing her for the blackface comments at an NBC internal town hall meeting became public, and fired her agent out of concern that his company’s representation of NBC News President Noah Oppenheim would be a conflict of interest, said the person close to Kelly. Yet the likelihood that a news executive’s comments before a roomful of journalists would remain secret is remote.

NBC representatives said they had no comment beyond the discussion of why Kelly wasn’t on the air Thursday.

All of this points toward a likely exit from NBC by Kelly, who has found it difficult to maintain a loyal constituency. Many of her former Fox News Channel viewers were upset by a perceived disloyalty in leaving and her clashes with President Donald Trump during his campaign. At the same time, her former association with Fox caused some NBC colleagues and viewers to regard her with suspicion.

Kelly’s viewers were given no reason for her absence; a notice on the screen said the show was “previously recorded.”

There were indications that the plans had come about quickly. “Happy Friday,” she said at the opening of the taped show on Thursday.

“The Real Housewives of New York City” episode aired this spring on the NBC-owned Bravo network, with character Luann deLesseps wearing a gigantic Afro to portray Ross. After criticism surfaced about her costume, she said she was tanned and used a bronzer, but was not trying to appear in blackface.

The Sinister Reason the U.S. Persists in Waging Losing Wars

As America enters the 18th year of its war in Afghanistan and its 16th in Iraq, the war on terror continues in Yemen, Syria, and parts of Africa, including Libya, Niger, and Somalia. Meanwhile, the Trump administration threatens yet more war, this time with Iran. (And given these last years, just how do you imagine that’s likely to turn out?) Honestly, isn’t it time Americans gave a little more thought to why their leaders persist in waging losing wars across significant parts of the planet?  So consider the rest of this piece my attempt to do just that.

Let’s face it: profits and power should be classified as perennial reasons why U.S. leaders persist in waging such conflicts. War may be a racket, as General Smedley Butler claimed long ago, but who cares these days since business is booming? And let’s add to such profits a few other all-American motivations. Start with the fact that, in some curious sense, war is in the American bloodstream. As former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges once put it, “War is a force that gives us meaning.” Historically, we Americans are a violent people who have invested much in a self-image of  now being displayed across the “global battlespace.” (Hence all the talk in this country not about our soldiers but about our “warriors.”) As the bumper stickers I see regularly where I live say: “God, guns, & guts made America free.” To make the world freer, why not export all three?

Add in, as well, the issue of political credibility. No president wants to appear weak and in the United States of the last many decades, pulling back from a war has been the definition of weakness. No one — certainly not Donald Trump — wants to be known as the president who “lost” Afghanistan or Iraq. As was true of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the Vietnam years, so in this century fear of electoral defeat has helped prolong the country’s hopeless wars. Generals, too, have their own fears of defeat, fears that drive them to escalate conflicts (call it the urge to surge) and even to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons, as General William Westmoreland did in 1968 during the Vietnam War.

Washington’s own deeply embedded illusions and deceptions also serve to generate and perpetuate its wars. Lauding our troops as “freedom fighters” for peace and prosperity, presidents like George W. Bush have waged a set of brutal wars in the name of spreading democracy and a better way of life. The trouble is: incessant war doesn’t spread democracy — though in the twenty-first century we’ve learned that it does spread terror groups — it kills it. At the same time, our leaders, military and civilian, have given us a false picture of the nature of the wars they’re fighting. They continue to present the U.S. military and its vaunted “smart” weaponry as a precision surgical instrument capable of targeting and destroying the cancer of terrorism, especially of the radical Islamic variety. Despite the hoopla about them, however, those precision instruments of war turn out to be blunt indeed, leading to the widespread killing of innocents, the massive displacement of people across America’s war zones, and floods of refugees who have, in turn, helped spark the rise of the populist right in lands otherwise still at peace.

Lurking behind the incessant warfare of this century is another belief, particularly ascendant in the Trump White House: that big militaries and expensive weaponry represent “investments” in a better future — as if the Pentagon were the Bank of America or Wall Street. Steroidal military spending continues to be sold as a key to creating jobs and maintaining America’s competitive edge, as if war were America’s primary business. (And perhaps it is!)

Those who facilitate enormous military budgets and frequent conflicts abroad still earn special praise here. Consider, for example, Senator John McCain’s rapturous final sendoff, including the way arms maker Lockheed Martin lauded him as an American hero supposedly tough and demanding when it came to military contractors. (And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.)

Put all of this together and what you’re likely to come up with is the American version of George Orwell’s famed formulation in his novel 1984: “war is peace.”

The War the Pentagon Knew How to Win

Twenty years ago, when I was a major on active duty in the U.S. Air Force, a major concern was the possible corroding of civil-military relations — in particular, a growing gap between the military and the civilians who were supposed to control them. I’m a clipper of newspaper articles and I saved some from that long-gone era. “Sharp divergence found in views of military and civilians,” reported the New York Times in September 1999. “Civilians, military seen growing apart,” noted the Washington Post a month later. Such pieces were picking up on trends already noted by distinguished military commentators like Thomas Ricks and Richard Kohn. In July 1997, for instance, Ricks had written an influential Atlantic article, “The Widening Gap between the Military and Society.” In 1999, Kohn gave a lecture at the Air Force Academy titled “The Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today.”

A generation ago, such commentators worried that the all-volunteer military was becoming an increasingly conservative and partisan institution filled with generals and admirals contemptuous of civilians, notably then-President Bill Clinton. At the time, according to one study, 64% of military officers identified as Republicans, only 8% as Democrats and, when it came to the highest levels of command, that figure for Republicans was in the stratosphere, approaching 90%. Kohn quoted a West Point graduate as saying, “We’re in danger of developing our own in-house Soviet-style military, one in which if you’re not in ‘the party,’ you don’t get ahead.” In a similar fashion, 67% of military officers self-identified as politically conservative, only 4% as liberal.

In a 1998 article for the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, Ricks noted that “the ratio of conservatives to liberals in the military” had gone from “about 4 to 1 in 1976, which is about where I would expect a culturally conservative, hierarchical institution like the U.S. military to be, to 23 to 1 in 1996.” This “creeping politicization of the officer corps,” Ricks concluded, was creating a less professional military, one in the process of becoming “its own interest group.” That could lead, he cautioned, to an erosion of military effectiveness if officers were promoted based on their political leanings rather than their combat skills.

How has the civil-military relationship changed in the last two decades? Despite bending on social issues (gays in the military, women in more combat roles), today’s military is arguably neither more liberal nor less partisan than it was in the Clinton years. It certainly hasn’t returned to its citizen-soldier roots via a draft. Change, if it’s come, has been on the civilian side of the divide as Americans have grown both more militarized and more partisan (without any greater urge to sign up and serve). In this century, the civil-military divide of a generation ago has been bridged by endless celebrations of that military as “the best of us” (as Vice President Mike Pence recently put it).

Such expressions, now commonplace, of boundless faith in and thankfulness for the military are undoubtedly driven in part by guilt over neither serving, nor undoubtedly even truly caring. Typically, Pence didn’t serve and neither did Donald Trump (those pesky “heel spurs”). As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich put it in 2007: “To assuage uneasy consciences, the many who do not serve [in the all-volunteer military] proclaim their high regard for the few who do. This has vaulted America’s fighting men and women to the top of the nation’s moral hierarchy. The character and charisma long ago associated with the pioneer or the small farmer — or carried in the 1960s by Dr. King and the civil-rights movement — has now come to rest upon the soldier.” This elevation of “our” troops as America’s moral heroes feeds a Pentagon imperative that seeks to isolate the military from criticism and its commanders from accountability for wars gone horribly wrong.

Paradoxically, Americans have become both too detached from their military and too deferential to it. We now love to applaud that military, which, the pollsters tell us, enjoys a significantly higher degree of trust and approval from the public than the presidency, Congress, the media, the Catholic church, or the Supreme Court. What that military needs, however, in this era of endless war is not loud cheers, but tough love.

As a retired military man, I do think our troops deserve a measure of esteem. There’s a selfless ethic to the military that should seem admirable in this age of selfies and selfishness. That said, the military does not deserve the deference of the present moment, nor the constant adulation it gets in endless ceremonies at any ballpark or sporting arena. Indeed, deference and adulation, the balm of military dictatorships, should be poison to the military of a democracy.

With U.S. forces endlessly fighting ill-begotten wars, whether in Vietnam in the 1960s or in Iraq and Afghanistan four decades later, it’s easy to lose sight of where the Pentagon continues to maintain a truly winning record: right here in the U.S.A. Today, whatever’s happening on the country’s distant battlefields, the idea that ever more inflated military spending is an investment in making America great again reigns supreme — as it has, with little interruption, since the 1980s and the era of President Ronald Reagan.

The military’s purpose should be, as Richard Kohn put it long ago, “to defend society, not to define it. The latter is militarism.” With that in mind, think of the way various retired military men lined up behind Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, including a classically unhinged performance by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn (he of the “lock her up” chants) for Trump at the Republican convention and a shout-out of a speech by retired General John Allen for Clinton at the Democratic one. America’s presidential candidates, it seemed, needed to be anointed by retired generals, setting a dangerous precedent for future civil-military relations.

A Letter From My Senator

A few months back, I wrote a note to one of my senators to complain about America’s endless wars and received a signed reply via email. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that it was a canned response, but no less telling for that. My senator began by praising American troops as “tough, smart, and courageous, and they make huge sacrifices to keep our families safe. We owe them all a true debt of gratitude for their service.” OK, I got an instant warm and fuzzy feeling, but seeking applause wasn’t exactly the purpose of my note.

My senator then expressed support for counterterror operations, for, that is, “conducting limited, targeted operations designed to deter violent extremists that pose a credible threat to America’s national security, including al-Qaeda and its affiliates, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), localized extremist groups, and homegrown terrorists.” My senator then added a caveat, suggesting that the military should obey “the law of armed conflict” and that the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) that Congress hastily approved in the aftermath of 9/11 should not be interpreted as an “open-ended mandate” for perpetual war.

Finally, my senator voiced support for diplomacy as well as military action, writing, “I believe that our foreign policy should be smart, tough, and pragmatic, using every tool in the toolbox — including defense, diplomacy, and development — to advance U.S. security and economic interests around the world.” The conclusion: “robust” diplomacy must be combined with a “strong” military.

Now, can you guess the name and party affiliation of that senator? Could it have been Lindsey Graham or Jeff Flake, Republicans who favor a beyond-strong military and endlessly aggressive counterterror operations? Of course, from that little critical comment on the AUMF, you’ve probably already figured out that my senator is a Democrat. But did you guess that my military-praising, counterterror-waging representative was Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts?

Full disclosure: I like Warren and have made small contributions to her campaign. And her letter did stipulate that she believed “military action should always be a last resort.” Still, nowhere in it was there any critique of, or even passingly critical commentary about, the U.S. military, or the still-spreading war on terror, or the never-ending Afghan War, or the wastefulness of Pentagon spending, or the devastation wrought in these years by the last superpower on this planet. Everything was anodyne and safe — and this from a senator who’s been pilloried by the right as a flaming liberal and caricatured as yet another socialist out to destroy America.

I know what you’re thinking: What choice does Warren have but to play it safe? She can’t go on record criticizing the military. (She’s already gotten in enough trouble in my home state for daring to criticize the police.) If she doesn’t support a “strong” U.S. military presence globally, how could she remain a viable presidential candidate in 2020?

And I would agree with you, but with this little addendum: Isn’t that proof that the Pentagon has won its most important war, the one that captured — to steal a phrase from another losing war — the “hearts and minds” of America? In this country in 2018, as in 2017, 2016, and so on, the U.S. military and its leaders dictate what is acceptable for us to say and do when it comes to our prodigal pursuit of weapons and wars.

So, while it’s true that the military establishment failed to win those “hearts and minds” in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, they sure as hell didn’t fail to win them here. In Homeland, U.S.A., in fact, victory has been achieved and, judging by the latest Pentagon budgets, it couldn’t be more overwhelming.

If you ask — and few Americans do these days — why this country’s losing wars persist, the answer should be, at least in part: because there’s no accountability. The losers in those wars have seized control of our national narrative. They now define how the military is seen (as an investment, a boon, a good and great thing); they now shape how we view our wars abroad (as regrettable perhaps, but necessary and also a sign of national toughness); they now assign all serious criticism of the Pentagon to what they might term the defeatist fringe.

In their hearts, America’s self-professed warriors know they’re right. But the wrongs they’ve committed, and continue to commit, in our name will not be truly righted until Americans begin to reject the madness of rampant militarism, bloated militaries, and endless wars.

The Startling Rise of India’s #MeToo Movement

The world’s largest democracy is finally having its own #MeToo moment. Just about a year after the Harvey Weinstein revelations opened the floodgates of assault accusations in the United States, India has been rocked by scandal after scandal over the span of a few weeks, arising from accusations made by women of sexual assault and harassment that are finally being taken seriously. As here in the U.S., it remains to be seen if this is a movement or a moment (to borrow a phrase associated with Black Lives Matter).

For decades, Indian women have been protesting pervasive sexism, from street-level harassment, known by the inappropriate term “Eve-teasing,” and Bollywood’s “casting couch” to the two high-profile cases of brutal gang rapes that made international headlines in 2012 and 2018. But now, many women are feeling emboldened to come forward with their accounts of incidents that they have remained silent about for years. And some men are feeling the consequences of their actions in the form of public shaming and the loss of their jobs and positions—a similar phenomenon to what has unfolded in the U.S. over the past year.

The trend in India is so strong that last week the search engine Google released an interactive map of where the phrase “Me Too” was most searched for on the planet, and CBS reported that according to the map, “All of the top five cities trending for #MeToo searches were located in India, with the depiction of the country glowing brighter than any other location on the map.”

Shonali Bose is an award-winning filmmaker, director, screenwriter and producer whose work is driven by her fierce political activism. Her acclaimed movies “Amu” and “Margarita With A Straw” are both women-centered films that deal with trauma and joy. Her forthcoming release, “The Sky is Pink,” stars Priyanka Chopra, whom American audiences will recognize from her role on the television show “Quantico.”

In an interview from Mumbai, India, where she is now based, Bose shared with me her surprise at how quickly things have unfolded over the past several weeks. “This speaking out suddenly is brand new. This has never happened before,” she said.

Just as Bose was in talks with her colleagues about how to support women who have experienced sexual assault and harassment in the industry, several stories began to break. Along with several other high-profile women directors and actors, including Konkona Sen Sharma, Nandita Das, Zoya Akhtar and Kiran Rao, Bose signed onto a strongly worded statement pledging “complete solidarity with the women who have come forward with honest accounts of harassment and assault” and, importantly, promising “to not work with proven offenders.”

One of biggest scandals to emerge involves an incident that took place 10 years ago on the set of a Bollywood film. A young actress named Tanushree Dutta—new to the industry—spoke out about being molested on the set of a film by Nana Patekar, one of India’s most distinguished and celebrated actors—a man I remember watching onscreen as a child in many of India’s so-called “art films.” By Dutta’s account, Patekar took advantage of her on set, and when she refused to cooperate, he used his connections in a local fundamentalist political party to call an angry mob to intimidate her and physically attack her car as she tried to leave the set with her parents. The experience left her deeply traumatized and forced her out of the film industry—and even the country.

Dutta has spoken out about her experiences for years, and as recently as late September held a press conference, saying, “I had to walk away from the industry out of fear, trauma. I was afraid to come on a movie set.” After Patekar sent her a legal warning in early October against publicizing her experience, the story finally began making serious headlines and is being seen as part of the #MeToo narrative. In an interview with BuzzFeed, Dutta said, “It’s not as though I ever stopped talking about it; I’ve been repeating the same story since 2008. The only thing that’s changed is that people suddenly want to listen.”

Several women have also accused longtime “Indian Idol” music director and co-judge Anu Malik of sexual harassment. Malik’s case is particularly abhorrent in that he stands accused of preying on multiple teenage girls for years, using his power the way Weinstein did in the U.S. to make or break careers. In the wake of the revelations, Malik was forced out as “Indian Idol” judge—a position he held for more than a decade.

Another major scandal is the accusation against filmmaker Vikas Bahl by an unnamed female employee of his highly successful company, Phantom Films. Huffington Post India, which broke the story Oct. 6, reported: “Bahl, the woman crew member said, insisted on dropping her to her hotel room on the early hours of 5 May 2015 and pretended to pass out drunk on her bed, only to awaken soon after and masturbate on her.”

Ironically, Bahl is best known for directing “Queen,” a film with a strong female lead, focused on her journey toward independence from a man. Some months after the incident, the woman in question informed one of the other directors at Phantom, Anurag Kashyap, but he failed to take action. The company went on to achieve major successes, including making the series “Sacred Games” for Netflix. But since the story became public, Phantom films has abruptly dissolved, and Kashyap acknowledged that he “failed” the accuser.

India’s most popular comedy group, All India Bakchod (AIB), has also fallen off its pedestal in the era of #MeToo. With more than 3.4 million subscribers to its channel, AIB cut its teeth on digital platforms like YouTube, making edgy and comedic social satire that often questioned India’s sexist traditions. But in the wake of revelations that one of the group’s members did not act on information about a fellow comedian’s sexual harassment, and allegations that another of the group’s members harassed a woman, the group’s future is in jeopardy.

In its many years of tackling the scourge of street-level harassment and violent rapes that make the news, the Indian feminist movement had not fully confronted the hypocrisy of forward-thinking and supposedly progressive or feminist men who shape pop culture like Bahl, his colleagues at Phantom Films, AIB and others. But now the dam has burst, and the #MeToo stories have broken in India in the span of just a few days.

The accusations are not restricted to the entertainment industry. A prominent journalist-turned-lawmaker named MJ Akbar was forced to resign from his position last week as minister of state for external affairs after being accused by 16 different women of sexual harassment when he was a newspaper editor. Rahul Johri, the head of India’s powerful cricket board, has just been put on leave while an accusation made against him is being investigated, and so on.

Bose included a warning in her conversation, however. “You have to be very, very careful,” she said. “Let’s not minimize women who have actually survived assaults saying anything about anyone—because that really brings the whole movement down.” She cited some rumors against prominent men that were questionable and could undermine the movement for women’s rights. Given Indians’ tendency to veer toward extreme vengefulness against accused rapists—as the angry calls for the death penalty have shown—there is a lot at stake as the stories come tumbling out into the open, one after another.

Bose says India’s film industry must take some responsibility for the pervasiveness of sexual assault. Just as Hollywood movies normalized rape culture, Indian cinema is replete with titillating scenes that veer dangerously close to normalizing stalking, coercion and rape. “What we can do as filmmakers [is] … push back to our male counterparts, to our producers and say, ‘change the kind of content you finance,’ ” she told me. Bose has experienced firsthand the resistance from a male-dominated film industry intent on reproducing sexist stereotypes, saying, “It’s not that I have faced discrimination because I’m a woman. My stories have faced discrimination because they are women-led.”

India is brimming with women leaders who have led, and are leading, movements for gender equality, and not just in urban centers. Just as Tarana Burke is the unsung hero of the U.S. #MeToo movement, a women’s rights activist based in India’s rural northwest state of Rajasthan, Bhanwari Devi, has now been credited with being the mother of India’s #MeToo movement. And in the past week, Rehana Fathima, a young activist, has been spotlighted for leading the fight to allow women the right to enter a sacred temple in Kerala.

There are countless others like them in the world’s largest democracy, fighting for their right to be seen, heard and respected, and offering the strong possibility that India’s #MeToo chapter will be part of an ongoing movement.

California White Supremacists Arrested on Riot Charges

LOS ANGELES—The leader of a Southern California white supremacist group and two other members were arrested on charges of inciting violence at California protests and at a deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, prosecutors said Wednesday.

The arrests come weeks after other group members were indicted in Virginia on similar charges.

Rise Above Movement leader Robert Rundo was arrested Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport after returning to the U.S. from Central America, U.S. Attorney’s office spokesman Thom Mrozek said. Rundo was denied bail in Los Angeles federal court on Wednesday.

Two others, Robert Boman and Tyler Laube, were arrested Wednesday morning, and Aaron Eason remains at large, Mrozek said. All four are charged with traveling to incite or participate in riots. Attorney information for the defendants could not immediately be found.

The men allegedly took actions with the “intent to incite, organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on riots,” according to a complaint from the U.S. Attorney’s office.

“RAM members violently attacked and assaulted counter-protesters” at events in Charlottesville and in the California cities of Huntington Beach, Berkeley and San Bernardino, an FBI affidavit accompanying the complaint said.

Prosecutors have described the Rise Above Movement as a militant white supremacist group that espouses anti-Semitic and other racist views and meets regularly to train in boxing and other fighting techniques.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, Rise Above Movement members believe they are fighting against a “modern world” corrupted by the “destructive cultural influences” of liberals, Jews, Muslims and non-white immigrants. Members refer to themselves as the mixed martial arts club of the “alt-right” fringe movement, a loose mix of neo-Nazis, white nationalists and other far-right extremists.

“They very much operate like a street-fighting club,” Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, said earlier this month. The group has roots in the racist skinhead movement in Southern California, Segal said.

The latest arrests come just weeks after the indictments of four other California members of RAM for allegedly inciting the Virginia riot.

In August 2017, they made their way to the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville with their hands taped, “ready to do street battle,” U.S. Attorney Thomas Cullen said at a news conference announcing the charges earlier this month.

Hundreds of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville in part to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Clashes erupted Aug. 11 as a crowd of white nationalists marching through the University of Virginia campus carrying torches and chanting racist slogans encountered a small group of counter-protesters.

The next day, more violence broke out between counter-protesters and attendees of the “Unite the Right” rally, which was believed to be the largest gathering of white nationalists in at least a decade. Street fighting exploded before the scheduled event could begin and went on for nearly an hour in view of police until authorities forced the crowd to disperse.

After authorities forced the rally to disband Aug. 12, Heather Heyer, 32, was killed when a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters.

The death toll rose to three when a state police helicopter that had been monitoring the event crashed, killing two troopers.

Trump’s Air Pollution Adviser Denies Link Between Dirty Air and Health Problems

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

Last spring, air pollution researchers from around the world gathered to discuss their latest findings. Among them were scientists who led landmark studies linking smog and soot to deadly health problems.

So it was shocking when one speaker essentially told everyone in the room that they were wrong.

In his half-hour presentation, Tony Cox, a risk analyst from Denver, claimed that researchers are overstating the dangers of air pollution. He explained how his own statistical modeling of health data found no connection between dirty air and respiratory problems or heart attacks.

Scientists and others at the Health Effects Institute annual conference were appalled. Some added to their speeches what they had thought was obvious: Yes, air pollution really is dangerous.

Cox might have been just shrugged off as a provocateur, a denier of established science. But he leads the Trump administration’s panel of scientists that offers advice on how to protect the health of about 126 million Americans who live in smoggy and sooty places.

In that role, he’s in a prime position to spread his skepticism of the science of air pollution: The Environmental Protection Agency is poised this year to review its health standards for fine particles known as PM2.5 and ozone, the main component of smog.

These decisions, scientists say, literally could mean life and death for people in cities across the United States.

Tony Cox (center), chairman of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, has a background as a statistician and no medical or health training. Cox says researchers are overstating the dangers of air pollution. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

The EPA’s seven-member Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which has been completely remade under President Donald Trump, is responsible for reviewing the science and advising the EPA on what level of pollution is unhealthy. Cox was appointed a year ago, and earlier this month, all remaining holdovers from the Obama administration were replaced with new appointees, including two who also downplay the threats of breathing polluted air.

Powerful industries – such as power companies, vehicle manufacturers and oil companies – oppose tighter health standards because they would force states to adopt costly rules that cut emissions.

According to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Cox was nominated for the science board’s top position by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has sued the EPA multiple times in an effort to loosen air pollution standards. The nomination came from Dan Byers of the chamber’s Global Energy Institute, who leads “efforts to promote and maintain coal’s vital role in America’s energy system.”

Cox has made his living challenging established science on behalf of industry. He has worked as a consultant for more than a dozen companies or industry groups that lobby against clean air or worker safety rules and are major sources of pollution, according to his website. He consulted for the American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies, and the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association, which represents makers of diesel and gasoline engines. He also consulted for the mining industry and tobacco giant Philip Morris.

“Industries hire Cox to sow doubt about the scientific evidence, to make the case that agencies don’t have any proof,” said Celeste Monforton, a worker safety advocate who worked at the Department of Labor in the 1990s. “Already, there’s some reticence around regulation. If you can introduce more doubt, it can be very effective.”

In an interview, Cox said there is no proof that cleaning air saves lives. He also has written that there’s no link between fine particle pollution and human health and that the health benefits from reducing ozone are “exaggerated.”

“Folks talk a good game and maybe fool themselves and others for a decade or so with feel-good projections and estimates, while all the time, the public gets zero actual measurable health benefits in terms of reduced death rates caused by the intervention,” Cox said.

Numerous scientific studies around the world have reported the same results for two decades: Fine particles and ozone raise the risk of people dying from asthma, heart attacks, pneumonia and other serious lung and heart ailments, and cleaning the air reduces deaths and hospitalizations.

Cox is “clearly outside the mainstream,” said Chris Zarba, who led the EPA staff overseeing the science boards for six years until he retired in February. “He is not someone I would have picked. You want some diversity (on the board), you want some outsiders, but only up to a point.”

Air pollution experts also have raised concerns about the expertise of the rest of the panel, with only one member with a medical or health background. None is an epidemiologist, the primary discipline that investigates human health effects of pollution. Five of the seven are engineers or toxicologists.

George Thurston, who served on a subcommittee of the clean air board under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is worried that the changes under Trump will skew the panel’s nonpartisan science advisory work.

“Special interests get ahold of it and misrepresent the results,” said Thurston, who directs a program studying human health effects of air pollution at New York University’s School of Medicine. “And all the time, you’re delaying the public health benefits of regulation. That’s the goal.”

No medical or health training

Cox’s background as a statistician – with degrees in risk analysis, mathematical economics and operations research – makes him an unconventional fit compared with the doctors and scientists who traditionally have led the air pollution panel. His focus is risk analysis, a mathematical field designed to bring order to uncertain situations in which data is scarce or messy. He has no medical or health training.

Cox is the editor-in-chief of Risk Analysis: An International Journal and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering for “applications of operations research and risk analysis to significant national problems.” He designed a toolkit for analyzing cause and effect that he described as a “totally dispassionate and honest mechanical” means of clearing away statistical noise.

Cox relies on a strategy that’s commonly applied by major corporations seeking to limit regulation: He plays on the uncertainty inherent in all scientific analyses.

Take particulate matter, tiny pieces of soot a fraction of the diameter of a human hair, which come from burning fuel in smokestacks and vehicles. The particles can lodge in the lungs and enter the bloodstream, inflaming lung diseases such as asthma and raising the risk of a heart attack.

Long-term studies of multiple cities by Harvard University, the University of Southern California and other schools have linked reduced particulate levels to improved lung development and respiratory health in children and more deaths from heart attacks and lung diseases on days when fine particles increase.

But when Cox applies his statistical model to the same data, he reaches a different conclusion. That’s because he is searching for factors other than pollution that may drive deaths. For instance, when he analyzed data on 100 cities, he reported “no evidence that reductions in PM2.5 concentrations cause reductions in mortality rates.” Instead, his analysis concluded that it was temperature driving deaths. (Colder air can trap particles close to the ground, so the two factors often come together.) In other analyses, Cox pointed to income as a bigger factor than pollution.

Most of the evidence of health benefits “when looked at carefully turns out to consist of a mix of bad statistics, wishful thinking and irresponsible claims,” Cox said.

Epidemiologists say there’s a role for causal analysis like Cox’s. But they say it can’t replace the large studies that show what happens to people’s health when real-world pollutant levels rise and fall, combined with controlled experiments exposing people and animals. Cause and effect is extremely difficult to prove in public health; instead, scientists search for repeated associations between sickness and pollution levels.

For instance, when a Utah steel mill that was releasing soot into the air shut down for 13 months, the number of children admitted to hospitals for asthma attacks and bronchitis dropped, according to one study. Once the mill reopened and the emissions returned, admissions nearly doubled.

The researchers couldn’t declare without a doubt that closing the mill improved children’s health. But C. Arden Pope, a Brigham Young University professor and the study’s author, said the evidence leaves no other conclusion. He said no one has found a “magical confounder” that could explain why twice as many children are hospitalized with asthma attacks when the steel mill operates.

“A lot of what (Cox) says is manufactured uncertainty,” said Gretchen Goldman, research director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If there’s a science-based rule, opponents will try to emphasize the uncertainty in the science to obscure its benefits.”

Tony Cox (center), chairman of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, has a background as a statistician and no medical or health training. Cox says researchers are overstating the dangers of air pollution. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

Industry ties on science boards

The air pollution board isn’t the only one the Trump administration has overhauled. Cox’s appointment came after then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt booted scientists from all advisory panels if they had received EPA research grants. That means most academics no longer qualify, while people with ties to polluting industries swamp the panels.

An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that 16 of the Trump administration’s 18 replacements for the EPA’s larger, broader Science Advisory Board last year had industry ties. The board’s new chairman, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality toxicology director Michael Honeycutt, has cast doubt on the effectiveness of EPA clean air rules. Another member, Robert Phalen, once said modern air is “a little too clean for optimum health.”

Cox’s work for industry often has disputed science supporting regulations. In 2014, Cox spoke at a public hearing on behalf of the American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical companies, arguing against a proposed federal rule tightening limits on worker exposure to silica dust. He called the government’s assessment, which linked low levels to lung disease, “not ready for prime time.”

His testimony prompted a fiery retort from a nationally known scientist: Robert Park of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health told the hearing audience that it was “ludicrous” for Cox to question “100 years of research” showing silica’s health effects.

“We aren’t stupid,” Park told him.

For diesel engine manufacturers, Cox criticized science that links diesel exhaust to lung cancer. Diesels are a major source of the fine particles that his panel will review.

A 2012 study by Cox, partially funded by Philip Morris, found that smoking 10 or fewer cigarettes per day didn’t raise the risk of heart disease. According to his website, he also consulted for the tobacco company multiple times between 2004 and 2009, including questioning whether smoking causes lung cancer and other lung diseases.

The National Mining Association retained him in 2011 to testify against a rule that would limit miners’ exposure to coal dust to combat black lung disease. In addition, the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association funded a 2013 paper he wrote questioning the links between cancers and proximity to California rock mines.

Industry representatives often have served on EPA panels. George Wolff, a scientist for General Motors, led the clean air panel for three years in the 1990s. But under previous administrations, they were in the minority, outweighed by voices from academia.

EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler earlier this month disbanded a large subcommittee of scientists that reviewed health effects of particulates and scrapped plans to create one for ozone. That means the EPA will rely on the seven panelists rather than two dozen or more specialized experts when it decides whether to loosen or tighten air standards.

“You can’t say you are serious about the views of the scientific community and then limit the expertise at the table,” said John Bachmann, a former EPA director for science policy on air quality under the George W. Bush administration. “It is a travesty.”

One new air pollution board member is Timothy Lewis, an aquatic ecology engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers whose work focuses on controlling invasive species in waterways. He has no apparent expertise in human effects of air pollution.

Another new member is Sabine Lange, a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality toxicologist who has publicly questioned the impact of ozone pollution on health and collaborated with Honeycutt on a study criticizing the EPA’s benefits analysis for the standard.

Joining them is Steven Packham, a Utah Division of Air Quality toxicologist. Even though Salt Lake City has some of the nation’s worst particulate pollution, Packham said in 2016, “We don’t have enough data to say PM2.5 is causing the health effects that we’re attributing to it.”

The sole medical voice on the panel is Dr. Mark Frampton, a pulmonologist with the University of Rochester Medical Center who has studied the health effects of air pollutants, including leading the largest systematic study exposing patients to ozone. In a 2011 editorial in a medical journal, Frampton said that as health effects emerge at lower levels of ozone, the economic costs could become untenable, so “we need to consider new regulatory approaches in achieving the cleanest air possible and minimizing harm.”

Javier Sua uses an inhaler at his home in Fresno, Calif., which has air that is deemed unsafe under federal health standards. Studies have linked smog and soot to increased respiratory diseases and reduced lung function in children. (Scott Smith / AP)

Stakes are high in many cities

There’s a lot at stake for the public: More than 124 million people in 201 U.S. counties live in places where the air is considered unhealthy for ozone, and more than 23 million people breathe air with unhealthful levels of fine particles. Included are the Los Angeles region, Houston, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Sacramento, California. The elderly, children and people with cardiovascular or lung diseases are most at risk.

The clean air panel is the scientific filter for EPA policymakers who set the health standards. First, the panelists review a massive collection of studies assembled by EPA staff to say where the science is strongest and where uncertainty exists. That’s followed by an assessment of what the potential health effects are at various pollution levels.

Finally, the panel produces a recommendation for a safe air quality level. The federal Clean Air Act mandates that the standards be bounded strictly by science, not costs. The EPA does not have to adopt the recommendation, but a definitive scientific review from the panel is hard for the agency to ignore.

“Cox is someone who can go out and put in all kinds of weasel words,” said Bachmann, the former EPA official. “He can weaken all the evidence we have.”

Cox said he isn’t trying to stop the EPA from reducing pollution, but wants to offer “a more accurate and nuanced understanding of what we can control.” He said he hopes he can “help clarify and communicate clearly and precisely about what is known and what remains uncertain.”

But the new makeup of the science panel comes with other changes to the EPA’s review process for clean air standards. Pruitt in May outlined a streamlined review – removing some opportunities to challenge faulty assumptions – and asked the science panel for the first time to advise the EPA on adverse “social, economic or energy effects” of attaining standards.

Zarba, the former EPA official, worries that those changes could give air pollution skeptics such as Cox more power to bake in their conclusions from the start.

“If you cherry-pick the science a certain way,” Zarba said, “you can get whatever answer you want.”