Chris Hedges's Blog, page 538

Israel Lays Down Red Lines for Postwar Relations With Syria

JERUSALEM — As Syrian government forces press on with a furious offensive against rebel-held areas in the country’s south, Israel is quietly acknowledging that President Bashar Assad’s forces will soon be on its doorstep, laying down red lines for postwar relations with the Syrian leader.

Israel’s main concern is to keep archrival Iran, an Assad ally, as far away from its border as possible — along with its proxy, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.

“Our demand is that the Iranian forces will go out or withdraw from Syria as a whole, and in it specifically southwest Syria,” said a senior Israeli military official.

It is a turnaround from a few years ago, when Israeli leaders were publicly predicting Assad’s overthrow and some voices even mused about peace with a future democratic Syria.

While carefully refusing to take sides in the Syrian civil war, Israel offered humanitarian assistance to rebels, and it has made a public show of taking in several thousand wounded Syrians for medical treatment.

But there is a sense now in Israel, as in parts of the West, that despite Assad’s vicious conduct of the war — with hundreds of thousands killed and millions forced from their homes — his survival may be a less bad outcome than a takeover of Syria by Islamic militants who emerged over time as his most potent rivals.

Israeli leaders have sent a series of messages making clear that they expect Assad and his Iranian-backed allies to honor a decades-old agreement that sets out a demilitarized zone along the frontier and limits the number of forces each side can deploy within 25 kilometers (15 miles) of the zone.

“We have a Separation of Forces Agreement with Syria from 1974,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared this week. “This is the guiding principle. We will adhere to it very strictly and so must others, everyone.”

The agreement was signed a year after an Arab-Israeli war in which Syrian forces failed to retake a large part of the Golan Heights area seized by Israel in 1967.

The strategic highland has since been annexed by Israel, bringing some Israeli troops as well as settlements to within a few dozen miles (kilometers) of Damascus. Although Syria has long demanded the area back — and no countries recognize Israel’s annexation — the border has mostly been quiet for decades.

Israel and Syria are believed to have come close to a land-for-peace deal in the past, but today the chaos in Syria is widely seen as having justified Israel’s continued hold on the Golan.

The agreement was adhered to generally until the Syria war. But Israel has looked the other way amid minor violations of the agreement throughout the fighting — understanding that it would be hard to enforce given the numerous forces active in the area. But as Assad consolidates his gains, Israel wants the agreement strictly enforced once more.

The Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity under briefing guidelines, said that while there is no love lost for Assad, the Israeli thinking recognizes the emerging reality.

“We are looking for an address, a reliable one. We are looking for security and defense to our territory, interests and people,” he said. “If we get that, of course, it’s fine with us.”

Stephane Cohen, a former Israeli liaison officer to U.N. observers in the Golan, said Syria is expected to honor the 1974 agreement, as it did in the past. “The problem is what that comes with now, which is Iran and Hezbollah and other Shiite proxies. That’s the issue,” he said.

One complicating factor is that the U.N. peacekeepers have been forced to abandon their positions during the fighting and would need to return to monitor the truce.

Israel considers Iran to be its greatest threat, citing repeated Iranian calls for Israel’s destruction, Iran’s support for Hezbollah and other hostile militant groups and its development of long-range missiles.

Although Israel has refrained from taking sides in the Syrian war, it has been active in the skies over Syria. It has acknowledged carrying out dozens of airstrikes on suspected arms shipments bound for Hezbollah and is widely believed to have attacked a series of Iranian targets in recent months.

A turning point came in February, when Israel says an armed Iranian drone entered its airspace. Israel shot down the drone, then struck Iranian targets deep in Syria before one of its warplanes was downed.

Then, in early May, Israel attacked what it said was dozens of Iranian targets in Syria in response to Iranian rocket fire aimed at Israel. The rocket fire was retaliation for earlier Israeli strikes.

Since then, Israel has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran, or its Shiite proxies, to establish a permanent presence in postwar Syria. The Israeli military official said the concern is that Iran will use these forces to launch a low-level “war of attrition” with Israel.

A key player could be Russia, which also sent forces into Syria to back Assad. Israel anwnounced Thursday that Netanyahu will travel to Russia next week to meet with President Vladimir Putin, for what is expected to be the latest in a series of discussions about Syria.

For several years, Israel and Russia have maintained a special hotline to prevent their air forces from clashing in the skies over Syria. Israeli officials say the system has worked well.

In new fighting Thursday, Syrian and Russian forces launched a wave of air strikes against rebel-held areas in the southwest and pushed into a major town, resuming a wide-scale offensive after negotiations between Russia and the rebels collapsed.

The government’s advance in the southern Daraa province, which began on June 19, has captured wide areas and forced an estimated 330,000 people to flee their homes.

Opposition activists say scores of civilians have been killed and tens of thousands displaced.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported some 600 airstrikes in Daraa province.

State news agency SANA said Syrian troops entered the southern town of Saida after intense clashes with rebels. The Observatory said that with the capture of Saida, that would leave Syrian troops a few kilometers (miles) from the Naseeb border crossing with Jordan, a key goal.

The U.N. Security Council on Thursday failed to agree on any response to the escalating fighting during emergency closed-door consultations.

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Associated Press writers Ian Deitch in Jerusalem; Sarah El Deeb and Bassem Mroue in Beirut, and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Scandal-Plagued EPA Administrator Pruitt Resigns

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned Thursday amid ethics investigations of outsized security spending, first-class flights and a sweetheart condo lease.

With Pruitt’s departure, President Trump loses an administrator many conservatives regarded as one of the more effective members of his Cabinet. But Pruitt had also been dogged for months by a seemingly unending string of ethics scandals that spawned more than a dozen federal and congressional investigations.

Pruitt had appeared Wednesday at a White House picnic for Independence Day, wearing a red-checked shirt and loafers with gold trim. Trump gave him and other officials a brief shout-out, offering no sign of any immediate change in his job.

Trump said in a tweet Thursday that Deputy Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry executive, will assume the acting administrator position Monday.

A former Oklahoma attorney general close to the oil and gas industry, Pruitt had filed more than a dozen lawsuits against the agency he was picked to lead. Arriving in Washington, he worked relentlessly to dismantle Obama-era environmental regulations that aimed to reduce toxic pollution and planet-warming carbon emissions.

During his one-year tenure, Pruitt crisscrossed the country at taxpayer expense to speak with industry groups and hobnob with GOP donors, but he showed little interest in listening to advocates he derided as “the environmental left.” Those groups applauded his departure.

“Despite his brief tenure, Pruitt was the worst EPA chief in history,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “His corruption was his downfall, but his pro-polluter policies will have our kids breathing dirtier air long after his many scandals are forgotten.”

Like Trump, Pruitt voiced skepticism about mainstream climate science and was a fierce critic of the Paris climate agreement. The president cheered his EPA chief’s moves to boost fossil fuel production and roll back regulations opposed by corporate interests.

But despite boasts of slashing red tape and promoting job creation, Pruitt had a mixed record of producing real-world results. Many of the EPA regulations Pruitt scraped or delayed had not yet taken effect, and the tens of thousands of lost coal mining jobs the president pledged to bring back never materialized.

Pruitt was forced out following a series of revelations involving pricey trips with first-class airline seats and unusual security spending, including a $43,000 soundproof booth for making private phone calls. He also demanded 24-hour-a-day protection from armed officers, resulting in a swollen 20-member security detail that blew through overtime budgets and racked up expenses of more than $3 million.

Pruitt also had ordered his EPA staff to do personal chores for him, picking up dry cleaning and trying to obtain a used Trump hotel mattress for his apartment. He had also enlisted his staff to contact conservative groups and companies to find a lucrative job for his unemployed wife, including emails seeking a Chick-fil-A franchise from a senior executive at the fast-food chain.

Pruitt’s job had been in jeopardy since the end of March, when ABC News first reported that he leased a Capitol Hill condo last year for just $50 a night. It was co-owned by the wife of a veteran fossil fuels lobbyist whose firm had sought regulatory rollbacks from EPA.

Both Pruitt and the lobbyist, Steven Hart, denied he had conducted any recent business with EPA. But Hart was later forced to admit he had met with Pruitt at EPA headquarters last summer after his firm, Williams & Jensen, revealed he had lobbied the agency on a required federal disclosure form.

Pruitt also publicly denied any knowledge of massive raises awarded to two close aides he had brought with him to EPA from Oklahoma. Documents later showed Pruitt’s chief of staff had signed off on the pay hikes, indicating he had the administrator’s consent.

Pruitt is the latest Trump Cabinet official to lose his job over ethics issues. Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was fired in March amid questionable travel charges and a growing rebellion in his agency about the privatization of medical care. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was fired last year after it was disclosed he took costly charter flights instead of commercial planes.

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Follow Associated Press investigative reporter Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck

Poland’s Supreme Court Justices Defy Government Purge

From Denmark to Italy, far-right governments have gained power in Europe. The trend has also spread to Poland, where on Tuesday leaders of the Law and Justice Party ordered a purge of the country’s Supreme Court. Tens of thousands of Poles took to the streets in protest. Now, as NPR reported Wednesday, multiple judges are defying the purge, posing a stark challenge to the government.

The purge was spurred by new rules that lower the mandatory retirement age of Supreme Court justices from 70 to 65, forcing the retirements of 27 of the 72 judges in the country’s highest judicial chamber. 

The government defended its decision, claiming that “the forced retirements are aimed at fighting corruption and improving judicial efficiency,” as NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reported Wednesday. Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, also defended the rule to the European Parliament, saying, “Every EU country has the right to develop its judicial system according to its own traditions,” the BBC reported.

Protesters believe the rule is part of the Polish government’s attempt to stifle judicial independence. “We are here because of the destruction of the judiciary in Poland,” Kamila Wrzesinska, one of the demonstrators, told The New York Times.

The Law and Justice Party, the Times observes, has been laying the groundwork for the purge since it came to power in 2015. It took control of the country’s constitutional tribunal and ministry of justice, arming itself with new powers to choose judges, and harassing judges who dare to challenge it. The party gained votes partly based on a nationalist message, telling voters it was time for Poland to “get up from its knees.”

The slogan, the Times says, “found widespread appeal in villages and towns, especially in eastern Poland, where many people felt left behind as the country moved rapidly to embrace Western values and capitalism.”

What the Law and Justice Party did not prepare for, as NPR reported, was Malgorzata Gersdorf, head of Poland’s Supreme Court. She disobeyed the order, coming to work Wednesday morning and telling assembled protesters and reporters, “I want to show that the constitution and the violation of the constitution are two different things.”

Gersdorf has assistance from an unlikely source: the judge appointed to replace her. As the Times reports:

In a reflection of the chaos, the jurist named by the government as Justice Gersdorf’s successor, Justice Jozef Iwulski, 66, said: “President Andrzej Duda neither appointed me, nor did he entrust any duties to me. He didn’t make any decision in a concrete manner.”

In fact, it was Justice Gersdorf who had recommended that Justice Iwulski fill in for her—a move experts thought would make it harder for the party in power to stack the court.

According to the BBC, 10 other judges followed Gersdorf’s lead. The protest also attracted multiple leaders from Poland’s past, including former President Lech Walesa, a leader in the Solidarity movement that toppled the country’s Communist government, and Adam Strzembosz, who was instrumental in creating Poland’s constitution and was the first president of the Supreme Court after communism.

As of Thursday morning, there was no resolution in sight. In fact, The Associated Press reported, there was more rebellion: Judges in the constitutional tribunal wrote to their principal judge, saying she had kept important cases from them and prevented them from doing their jobs.

Surge in Illegal California Pot Shops Undercuts Legal Market

LOS ANGELES—A slight marijuana smell wafted out as a steady stream of customers walked into a warehouse, its doors and windows covered by bars.

Suddenly, police swooped in.

“Sheriff’s department! Search warrant!” a Los Angeles County deputy shouted as the team thundered through the front door and began hauling out people in handcuffs.

The Compton 20 Cap Collective just south of Los Angeles that was raided earlier this spring is one of hundreds of illegal marijuana stores operating in LA County, where marijuana is legal for anyone 21 and over and retailers must be licensed to sell to them.

Broad marijuana legalization arrived in California at the start of the year. From the beginning, there was concern the legal market would be undercut by the massive black market that has existed for decades.

And that’s what’s happening. Nowhere is it a bigger problem than in the state’s biggest legal local marijuana market: Los Angeles County.

The number of outlaw dispensaries in the county greatly outnumbers about 150 licensed storefront retailers.

That reality is a buzzkill for those trying to play by the rules.

Legal pot shops are losing customers who can get products more cheaply at illegal outlets that don’t charge or pay taxes, said Adam Spiker, executive director of the Southern California Coalition, a trade organization that represents cannabis growers, distributors and dispensary owners.

It’s an “unfair competitive situation for licensed businesses,” Spiker said.

“I think if you turn the tables and took cannabis out of the equation — if it was another industry that didn’t have the stigmas — the government would do everything they could to give those licensed business paying taxes a level playing field.”

One of the selling points for legalization was it would generate a tax windfall for state and local governments. However, during the first quarter, the state reported only $34 million from cultivation and excise taxes, putting it on pace to fall well below the $175 million forecast for the first six months.

In April, state regulators sent nearly 1,000 cease-and-desist letters to cannabis businesses they suspected were operating illegally. An analysis by the trade publication Marijuana Business Daily found about 64 percent of the businesses were in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Last month, the Los Angeles city attorney’s office charged 142 people as part of a crackdown on illegal dispensaries. It also sent cease-and-desist letters but declined to say how many.

Los Angeles County boasts the nation’s largest sheriff’s department, but even it has nowhere near the manpower to take down all the illegal pot shops. A task force overseen by Lt. Frank Montez raids an average of one dispensary a week.

However, the voter-approved ballot measure legalizing cannabis in California included a provision that made possessing more than 28.5 grams only a misdemeanor. That means officers can seize businesses’ cash and marijuana, but employees and owners rarely face jail, and illegal operations often quickly reopen.

“It’s a money-lucrative business so there are people willing to take the risk,” said Capt. Holly Francisco, who commands the sheriff’s department’s narcotics unit.

Montez sees his work as more than code enforcement. Marijuana sold illegally may be tainted with illegal pesticides and other harmful substances. And licensed marijuana shop owners who pay their taxes should have a fair playing field, he said.

“When you have an illegitimate, illegal dispensary operating, that not only hurts the industry as a whole but that really hurts the community,” Montez said.

At the Compton store, a sign above a security window says customers must be at least 18 and have a physician’s recommendation to buy medical marijuana and be 21 and have a valid photo ID for anything else. Like many others, the shop operated in plain sight and advertised online, including on WeedMaps, a go-to website for people looking to buy cannabis.

Inside, whiteboards on dirt-smudged walls advertised the prices for different types of cannabis and concentrates.

Cartridges for vapor pens and “Shatter,” a honey-like oil containing cannabis extract, cost between $15 and $30. Large display cases held jars of branded marijuana strains — 28 grams of “Purple Dragon” sold for $160.

“People out here on the street are thinking it is a legitimate operation and are smoking this cannabis with all these dangerous pesticides, and they are really killing themselves,” Montez said.

Some illegal pot shops look so legitimate that customers may not even realize they are illegal unless they figure out they aren’t being charged tax. But like any shopper looking for the best deal, plenty know these places are illegal and go because it’s cheaper.

While some illegal LA County pot shops grow their own plants, many are supplied by illegal grows in the hills of Northern California, long a major source of all U.S. pot.

Lake County, about 125 miles (201 kilometers) north of San Francisco, is home to many such grows because of its topography, which allows pot farmers to easily hide large operations. It has an abundance of federal and state forests and land where cartels set up operations.

Like the LA County Sheriff’s Department, Lake County lacks the manpower to put much of a dent in illegal operations.

Deputies patrol on the ground and in helicopters, and last year they destroyed about 250,000 plants and arrested 46 people for illegal grows, Sheriff Brian Martin said.

He has no estimate for the number of illegal grows in the county but is confident the hundreds of thousands of plants deputies chop down each year are “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Martin said his short-staffed department has assigned a single a detective full-time to marijuana eradication. He counts on help from state and federal agencies, but they too have their priorities.

“It’s all about manpower,” he said. “No one has enough of it.”

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Associated Press writer Paul Elias in San Francisco contributed to this report.

U.K. Official Accuses Russia of Dumping Poison in Britain

AMESBURY, England—Britain’s interior minister accused Russia on Thursday of turning the U.K. into a “dumping grounds for poison,” and demanded an explanation on how two people were inadvertently poisoned with the same military-grade nerve agent used to attack a former Russian spy and his daughter in the same area four months ago.

A man and woman in their 40s were in critical condition Thursday at a hospital in southwest England after they fell ill Saturday near Salisbury, a city not far from Britain’s iconic Stonehenge monument.

Experts at Britain’s Porton Down chemical weapons laboratory have determined that the two were exposed to the same type of Novichok nerve agent that was used to attack ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, on March 4 in Salisbury.

Britain has accused Russia of being behind the Skripal attack but the Kremlin denies any involvement. British Home Secretary Sajid Javid told Parliament on Thursday that it is now time for Russia to explain “exactly what has gone on.”

“It is completely unacceptable for our people to be either deliberate or accidental targets, or for our streets, our parks, our towns to be dumping grounds for poison,” Javid said.

The unexplained poisoning of two British citizens with no apparent link to Russia raised health concerns in Salisbury, where a massive decontamination effort took place after the Skripal poisoning case.

There was no panic as police cordons sprang up again and police stood guard near potential contamination sites Thursday. Still, residents could not contain their unease with a second brush with Novichok, even though public health officials said the risk of contamination to anyone was very low.

Keith Burton, 56, was among the concerned.

“We had hoped it was all over and done with,” he said. “Perhaps they forgot about something? Perhaps it was something dropped somewhere? We simply don’t know.”

Experts say just a few milligrams of the odorless liquid — the weight of a snowflake — is enough to kill a person within minutes. Finding it is the problem.

British officials say they believe the nerve agent was smeared on Skripal’s door, but have not explained how that was done. They had a timeline of the Skripals’ movements in Salisbury as they became ill, and spent millions of pounds cleaning those known sites. But they have not explained how they can, or cannot, track the nerve agent through an area.

Chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon said the latest victims are likely collateral damage from the Skripal attack.

“The Novichok gel that was smeared on the handle of the Skripals’ house was presumably transported in some device or syringe,” he said. “I think the working assumption now is that device or that syringe is what has appeared and the residue caused these two people to become ill.”

The new case has surfaced days before a NATO summit that is expected to address the worsening relations between Russia and the West. It also comes as Russia hosts the World Cup — a monthlong global extravaganza in which both the English and Russian soccer teams have advanced so far.

The Kremlin’s spokesman says Russia is concerned about the case but had nothing to do with either poisoning.

“Russia has categorically denied and continues to categorically deny the possibility of any kind of involvement to what was happening there,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters Thursday.

Peskov noted that Britain rejected Russia’s offer of a joint probe of the Skripal case, adding that the U.K. “has not presented any evidence of Russia’s involvement in this, besides unfounded accusations.”

Britain has said the type of nerve agent used in the Skripal attack was developed by the Soviet Union and could only have been produced by a state agency. British Prime Minister Theresa May gave Russia a deadline to explain how Novichok could have been used in Britain, and when the Kremlin failed to respond the government said it had no option but to believe the Russian state was involved in the attack.

Javid said Thursday the nerve agent involved in the current case was the same variety as that used against Skripal and his daughter, but it’s not clear whether the two samples came from the same batch.

“What we are clear on … is that this is the exact same nerve agent from the Novichok family,” he said. “We cannot attribute this to the same batch at this point. Scientists will be looking into that. I am also told that may not even be possible.”

Local police declared the recent poisoning a “major incident” Wednesday, four days after the couple — identified by friends as 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess and 45-year-old Charlie Rowley — were found at a residential building in Amesbury, eight miles (13 kilometers) from Salisbury.

Authorities initially thought the two had taken a contaminated batch of heroin or crack cocaine.

Police cordoned off a home in Amesbury, believed to be Rowley’s, and other places the pair visited, including a church, a pharmacy and a park in Salisbury near where the Skripals were found.

The Skripals’ illness initially baffled doctors after they were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury in March. Scientists at the Porton Down concluded they had been poisoned with Novichok.

Andrea Sella, professor of inorganic chemistry at University College London, said Novichok nerve agents “are designed to be quite persistent — they hang around in the environment, neither evaporating or decomposing quickly.

“That means that if a container or a surface was contaminated with this material, it would remain a danger for a long time. And it will be vital to trace the movements of this couple to identify where they might have come into contact with the source,” he said. “So while the public at large are at very low risk from this material, until the source is found there is a remote chance that someone else might come into contact with it.”

Ben Wallace, Britain’s security minister, said the Russians should come forward and tell British authorities what they know about the Novichok poisonings.

“I’m waiting for the phone call from the Russian state,” he said. “The offer is there. They are the ones who could fill in all the clues to keep people safe.”

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Kirka and Lawless reported from London. Matt Dunham in Amesbury and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed.

U.S Sidelined From Meeting on Iran Nuclear Deal

The five foreign ministers, minus U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, of the countries signatory to the 2015 Iran deal on curbing its civilian nuclear enrichment program will meet in Vienna on Friday to explore ways of preserving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action after the treaty was violated by the Trump administration.

The JCPOA was signed by Britain, France, Russia and China on the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany as an informal representative of the European Union.

Donald Trump is attempting to sabotage the deal, which placed severe restrictions on Iran’s enrichment activities in return for an end of Security Council sanctions. The deal implied that U.S. sanctions would be lifted or lightened as well, but that never happened because of the hostility of the Republican Congress to the deal.

I’m of a generation for which the idea of the U.N. Security Council meeting without the U.S. is hard to imagine. The conference is eloquent about how isolated and increasingly irrelevant Trump has made America. The rest of the world now sees Washington as an annoying problem to get around.

Think of it. This meeting involves three of America’s closest military and economic allies—Britain, France and Germany—having been pushed by Trump into the same corner with Russia and China in seeking to have better relations with Iran. I guess Trump has taught them a lesson.

Trump is ordering the Department of the Treasury to slap third-party sanctions on non-U.S. firms that do business with Iran. Companies like Total S.A., the French oil giant, that do business with the U.S. cannot afford to buck the Treasury Department and so are pulling out of planned Iran investments.

Smaller European firms that do not do business with the U.S. and that can use euros or some other currency and go through non-U.S. banks could conceivably go on doing business with Iran with no exposure to the wrath of the enormously powerful Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control. China’s gas giant, Sinopec, has said it will defy U.S. sanctions, as has the Turkish foreign ministry, and Russian officials and concerns also reject Trump’s bullying. While the Indian government has warned the country’s corporations to be ready for anything, New Delhi will make a stand for economic independence of the U.S. and plans to buy Iranian oil with rupees. The U.S. Treasury Department only has authority over dollar exchanges, and over banks that have branches in the U.S. or do business with the U.S.

Iran gave up perhaps 90 percent of its enrichment activities, keeping only a small number of centrifuges and enriching uranium only to the 3.5 percent needed to run its three Russian-built nuclear power plants at Bushehr. Tehran has therefore demanded economic guarantees from the remaining signatories.

Although Emmanuel Macron of France has said his government is committed to finding ways to protect French trade with and investment in Iran from Trump, few dispassionate observers think he is likely to succeed in that quest, with regard to the larger French firms. At most, small business might be sheltered.

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has made a lot of blustery threats about what will happen if Europe reneges on the JCPOA, including that Iran could restart its more ambitious enrichment program, and, more recently, could interfere with oil and gas exports from the Gulf (from which 22 percent of world petroleum originates). Iran is saying that if it cannot export its oil from the Gulf, then it can’t see why its enemies, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, should be allowed to.

It is hard to imagine such a scenario. Even during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, relatively little oil sabotage took place, because each side was afraid of lasting damage to its own industry. But that Iran could resume its enrichment program is entirely plausible. And that Iran could turn spoiler is also plausible, though in less overt ways.

Trump’s Ever More Powerful Weapons Against Journalism

Shortly after five staffers at the Capital Gazette were gunned down in their Annapolis, Md., office, President Donald Trump refused a request from the city’s mayor, Gavin Buckley, to lower American flags on federal property to half-staff. The White House eventually reversed its decision, but the episode underscores the contempt that this administration holds for the press.

Last month, after spending the better part of two years railing against purveyors of “fake news,” the president called the media the “enemy of the American people.” Now the Department of Homeland Security is reportedly compiling a database of journalists, editors, correspondents and bloggers to identify the leading voices in their respective fields.

According to an April 5 report in Bloomberg Government, DHS was searching for a contractor to help it monitor more than 290,000 global news sources in over 100 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian, all of which will be translated to English in real time. These outlets would include newspapers and magazines, television and radio, podcasts and social media.

“The DHS request says the selected vendor will set up an online ‘media influence database’ giving users the ability to browse based on location, beat, and type of influence,” Bloomberg’s Cary O’Reilly reveals. The database would include, “[f]or each influencer found, present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer.”

If the project sounds like a First Amendment violation waiting to happen, that’s because it is. While DHS insists that the database will “protect and enhance the resilience of the nation’s physical and cyberinfrastructure,” perhaps against foreign interference in future elections, the potential for censorship and other abuses of power is virtually limitless.

“Unfortunately, increasing government encroachment on the freedom of the press is the sinister backdrop to all of this,” writes Forbes’ Michelle Fabio. “Freedom House, which has monitored the status of the press for nearly 40 years, recently concluded that global media freedom has reached its lowest level in the past 13 years.”

The independent watchdog blames “crackdowns on independent media in authoritarian countries like Russia and China,” but it also cites “new threats to journalists and media outlets in major democracies”—Trump chief among them.

“No U.S. president in recent memory has shown greater contempt for the press than Trump in his first months in office,” reads Freedom House’s 2017 report. “He has repeatedly ridiculed reporters. … Such comments suggest a hostility toward the fundamental principles and purposes of press freedom, especially the news media’s role in holding governments to account for their words and actions—as opposed to the government holding the media to account.”

Barack Obama’s eight years in office were marked by an overt hostility toward leakers and whistleblowers; Leonard Downie’s report for the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2013 called the White House’s treatment of the press “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in the Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate.”

The report illustrates where the latest DHS venture can lead, and the extent to which disdain for journalists can be weaponized.

How to Prevent Future Trumps

Why did so many working class voters choose a selfish, thin-skinned, petulant, lying, narcissistic, boastful, megalomaniac for president?

It’s important to know, because we need to stop more Trumps in the future.

The answer lies in the interplay between deep-seated racism and stagnant and declining wages. Both must be addressed.

Some white working class men and women were – and still are – receptive to Trump’s bigotry.  But what made them receptive? Racism and xenophobia aren’t exactly new to American life. Fears of blacks and immigrants have been with us since the founding of the Republic.

What changed was the economy. Since the 1980s, the wages and economic prospects of the typical American worker have stagnated. Nearly 80 percent now live paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks have grown less secure.

Meanwhile, all the economy’s gains have gone to the richest ten percent, mostly the top 1 percent. Wealthy individuals and big corporations have, in turn, invested some of those gains into politics.

As a result, big money now calls the shots in Washington – getting subsidies, tax breaks, tax loopholes (even Trump promised to close the “carried interest” loophole yet it remains), and bailouts.

The near meltdown of Wall Street in 2008 caused a recession that cost millions their jobs, homes, and savings. But the Street got bailed out and not a single Wall Street executive went to jail.

In the two years leading up to the 2016 election, I revisited many of the places I had visited when I was labor secretary in the 1990s.

People told me the system was “rigged” against them. A surprising number said they planned to vote either for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump – the two anti-establishment candidates who promised to “shake up” Washington.

But Trump’s racism and xenophobia focused the cumulative economic rage on scapegoats that had nothing to do with its causes. It was hardly the first time in history a demagogue has used this playbook.

If America doesn’t respond to the calamity that’s befallen the working class, we will have Trumps as far as the eye can see.

A few Democrats are getting the message – pushing ambitious ideas like government-guaranteed full employment, single-payer health care, industry-wide collective bargaining, and a universal basic income.

We also need ways to finance these things, such as a carbon tax, a tax on Wall Street trades, and a progressive tax on wealth.

To accomplish all this we have to get big money out of politics.

Even if “Citizens United” isn’t overruled, big money’s influence can be limited with generous public financing of elections, full disclosure of the source of all campaign contributions, and a clampdown on the revolving door between business and government.

Trump isn’t the cause of what’s happened to America. He’s the consequence – the product of years of stagnant wages and big money’s corruption of our democracy combined with a long legacy of racism and bigotry.

If we really want to stop Trump and prevent future Trumps, we will need to address these causes of Trump’s rise.

Another Mystery Illness Rocks England After Spy’s Poisoning

AMESBURY, England—Four months after a quiet corner of England was plunged into a Cold War-style saga of spies, chemical weapons and international tensions, residents wondered Wednesday whether it was happening all over again.

Counterterrorism detectives and local police were investigating after a couple in their 40s fell critically ill from exposure to an unknown substance a few miles from where a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent in March.

Scientists were working to identify the substance amid speculation the victims could have been sickened by residue from the poison that nearly killed Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

Wiltshire Police declared the case a “major incident” Wednesday, four days after the man and woman were found collapsed at a residential building in Amesbury, eight miles (13 kilometers) from Salisbury, where the Skripals were poisoned. A major incident designation allows British authorities to mobilize more than one emergency agency.

Residents felt a grim sense of deja vu.

“With the Russian attack happening not long ago, we just assumed the worst,” said student Chloe Edwards, who said police and fire engines descended on a quiet street of newly built homes in Amesbury on Saturday evening.

Edwards said she saw people in green suits — like those worn by forensics officers — and her family was told to stay indoors for several hours.

Police said officers were initially called Saturday morning about a collapsed woman, then were summoned back in the evening after a man fell ill at the same property. Police at first thought the couple, identified by friends as 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, 45, had taken a contaminated batch of heroin or crack.

“However, further testing is now ongoing to establish the substance which led to these patients becoming ill,” said Deputy Chief Constable Paul Mills. “At this stage it is not yet clear if a crime has been committed.”

London’s Metropolitan Police said that “given the recent events in Salisbury,” counterterrorism officers were working with local police on the investigation.

British media reported that samples of the mystery substance had been sent to the Porton Down defense research laboratory for testing.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s office said she was being kept updated on the case, “which understandably is being treated with the utmost seriousness.”

The emergency services’ response echoes that in the case of Sergei Skripal, 67. The former Russian intelligence officer was convicted of spying for Britain before coming to the U.K. as part of a 2010 prisoner swap.

He had been living in Salisbury, a cathedral city 90 miles (145 kilometers) southwest of London, when he was struck down along with his 33-year-old daughter Yulia, who was visiting him.

The Skripals’ illness initially baffled doctors after they were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury. Scientists at Porton Down concluded they had been poisoned with Novichok, a type of nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

After spending weeks in critical condition, the Skripals were released from the hospital and taken to an undisclosed location for their protection. Doctors say they don’t know what the long-term prognosis is.

Britain accuses Russia of poisoning the Skripals, a claim Moscow strongly denies. The case sparked a diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West, including the expulsion of hundreds of diplomats from both sides.

The two Amesbury victims were at Salisbury District Hospital, which also treated the Skripals. Police said the victims are British citizens and live in the area.

Neighbors on Muggleton Road in Amesbury, where Rowley is believed to live, said they did not know the couple well and didn’t know what they did for a living. Most residents have only recently moved to the new houses and apartments.

Sam Hobson, a friend of the couple, said he was with them on Saturday, when Sturgess fell ill first. He told Sky News she was “having a fit, foam coming out of her mouth.” Rowley collapsed later the same day.

“He was sweating loads, dribbling. … He was rocking backwards and forwards,” Hobson said. “There was no response from him. He didn’t even know I was there.”

Police cordoned off a home in Amesbury, believed to be Rowley’s, and other places the pair visited, including a church, a pharmacy and a park in Salisbury, near where the Skripals were found.

Health officials said there is not believed to be any wider risk to the public, but they continue to watch the situation.

Salisbury and surrounding towns have only recently begun to recover from the frightening weeks at the center of an international spy drama.

Police from 40 departments in England and Wales returned home in June after months working on the Skripal case, and specially trained workers have spent months decontaminating sites around the city.

The British government has pledged 2.5 million pounds ($3.3 million) to local businesses to make up for lost revenue in the area, which is a gateway to Stonehenge, the ancient stone circle that is a huge tourist destination.

“Amesbury’s a lovely place — it’s very quiet, uneventful,” said resident Rosemary Northing. “So for this to happen, and the media response and the uncertainty, it’s unsettling.”

Justin Doughty, who lives across the street from the cordoned-off house, said residents want more information from the authorities.

“We don’t know, to be honest now, because is it linked to Salisbury or is it drug-related?” he said. “None of us is being told anything by the police, and it would be nice to know something.”

___

Lawless reported from London. Danica Kirka in London contributed to this story.

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