Chris Hedges's Blog, page 56

Activists Demand U.S. Close Guantánamo and End 18 Years of Torture

Human rights advocates marked the 18th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. military prison at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba with a rally outside the White House on Saturday to “demand an end to years of torture and human rights violations” and call for the detention camp’s immediate closure.

In January 2018, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep the prison open. The move, which revoked an order from Trump’s predecessor that called for the prison to be closed, outraged human rights defenders. With the demonstration Saturday, activists criticized not only Trump’s decisions related to the prison but also those of former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

“Three United States presidents have overseen Guantánamo during its shameful 18-year existence, yet it continues to remain open as people who have never been granted a trial are still detained and as they age and face the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in the prison, dying far away from the families and loved ones they have not seen in years,” Daphne Eviatar of Amnesty International USA said in a statement.

“It is well past time that Guantánamo close once and for all, and all the men who have long ago been cleared for release are transferred to countries that have agreed to accept them,” added Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program.

 

“Guantánamo is a place where our humanity, our lives, our freedom, is stripped away. A place like that shouldn’t exist” -Frank from @ThePeacePoets

Watch: https://t.co/S3iC7x1vk0 pic.twitter.com/HaxVdLsK9v

— The CCR (@theCCR) January 11, 2020

Organizers of the “Justice Now: Close Guantánamo and End Torture” rally included Amnesty International USA, Witness Against Torture, Defending Rights & Dissent, Center for Constitutional Rights, CAIR, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, the World Can’t Wait, CodePink, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Close Guantanamo, Tsuru for Solidarity, and Justice for Muslims Collective.

“Guantánamo currently holds 40 individuals: all Muslim men, many of whom were tortured in the camp,” Amnesty’s statement said. “Several detainees are experiencing health problems as a result of years of detention and instances of torture and other ill-treatment. Some remain detained despite having been cleared for transfer for years. This includes Toffiq al-Bihani, who has been imprisoned for eight years without trial.”

Today marks 18 years since Guantánamo opened. Toffiq al-Bihani has been imprisoned for 17 of those years. @Amnesty International calls on the USA @DeptofDefense to #TransferToffiq out – and #CloseGitmo! https://t.co/5SyjiSzbtr pic.twitter.com/wqg1XA8t2w

— Amnesty International (@amnestyusa) January 11, 2020

Participants in Saturday’s demonstration carried signs which declared “Close Guantánamo now!” and “Investigate and prosecute U.S. torture!” Other signs shared the stories of individuals detained at the prison. Some of the activists wore orange jumpsuits and black hoods.

18 years of injustice.

18 years of impunity.

18 years too long. #CloseGitmo pic.twitter.com/0QjTeJICpW

— Amnesty International (@amnestyusa) January 11, 2020

Along with the rally outside the White House Saturday afternoon, organizers held a funeral procession, which ended at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The activists carried nine coffins for nine detainees who have died at the prison.

Guantanamo is killing us. Shut it down! pic.twitter.com/cG81QWoeFb

— Witness Against Torture (@WitnessTorture) January 12, 2020

Organizers of the action aimed to call “attention to the brutality of the prison, including indefinite detention, and for an end to any and all uses of torture,” they explained on Facebook. “We cannot let Guantánamo disappear from the public consciousness.”

Defying Police, Iranians Protest Over Plane Shootdown

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iranian demonstrators defied a heavy police presence Sunday night to protest their country’s days of denials that it shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane carrying 176 people, the latest unrest to roil the capital amid soaring tensions with the United States.

Videos posted online showed protesters shouting anti-government slogans and moving through subway stations and sidewalks, many near Azadi, or Freedom, Square after an earlier call for people to demonstrate there. Other videos suggested similar protests were taking place in other Iranian cities.

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Riot police in black uniforms and helmets earlier massed in Vali-e Asr Square, at Tehran University and other landmarks. Revolutionary Guard members patrolled the city on motorbikes, and plainclothes security men were also out in force. People looked down as they walked briskly past police, hoping not to draw attention to themselves.

The plane crash early Wednesday killed everyone on board, mostly Iranians and Iranian-Canadians. After initially pointing to a technical failure and insisting the armed forces were not to blame, authorities on Saturday admitted to accidentally shooting it down in the face of mounting evidence and accusations by Western leaders.

Iran downed the flight as it braced for possible American retaliation after firing ballistic missiles at two bases in Iraq housing U.S. forces. The missile attack, which caused no casualties, was a response to the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top general, in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad. But no retaliation came.

Iranians have expressed anger over the downing of the plane and the misleading explanations from senior officials in the wake of the tragedy. They are also mourning the dead, which included many young people who were studying abroad.

“Even talking about it makes my heart beat faster and makes me sad,” said Zahra Razeghi, a Tehran resident. “I feel ashamed when I think about their families.”

“The denial and covering up the truth over the past three days greatly added to the suffering and pain of the families, and me,” she added.

Another individual, who identified himself only as Saeed, said Iran’s largely state-run media had concealed the cause of the crash for “political reasons.”

“Later developments changed the game, and they had to tell the truth,” he said.

Earlier Sunday, hundreds of students gathered at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University to mourn the victims and protest against authorities for concealing the cause of the crash, the semiofficial ISNA news agency reported.

Bahareh Arvin, a reformist member of the Tehran City Council, took to social media to say she was resigning in protest at the government’s lies and corruption. “With the current mechanism, there is no hope of reform,” she said.

Some Iranian artists, including famed director Masoud Kimiai, withdrew from an upcoming international film festival. Two state TV hosts resigned in protest over the false reporting about the cause of the plane crash.

President Donald Trump, who has expressed support for past waves of anti-government demonstrations in Iran, addressed the country’s leaders in a tweet, saying “DO NOT KILL YOUR PROTESTERS.”

“The World is watching. More importantly, the USA is watching,” he tweeted.

Iranians took to the streets in November after the government hiked gas prices, holding large protests in several cities. The government shut down internet access for days, making it difficult to gauge the scale of the protests and the subsequent crackdown. Amnesty International later said more than 300 people were killed.

A candlelight ceremony late Saturday in Tehran turned into a protest, with hundreds of people chanting against the country’s leaders — including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — and police dispersing them with tear gas. Protests were also held in the city of Isfahan and elsewhere.

Police briefly detained the British ambassador to Iran, Rob Macaire, who said he went to the vigil without knowing it would turn into a protest.

“Can confirm I wasn’t taking part in any demonstrations!” he tweeted. “Went to an event advertised as a vigil for victims of #PS752 tragedy. Normal to want to pay respects — some of victims were British. I left after 5 mins, when some started chanting.”

He said he was arrested 30 minutes after leaving the area.

Britain said its envoy was detained “without grounds or explanation” and in “flagrant violation of international law.”

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi later tweeted that Macaire was arrested “as an unknown foreigner in an illegal gathering.”

Araghchi said when police informed him that a man was arrested who claimed to be the British ambassador, he didn’t believe them. But he said that once he spoke to Macaire by phone, he realized it was him, and that the ambassador was freed 15 minutes later.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry later summoned the British ambassador over his “illegal and inappropriate presence” at the protest, it said on its Telegram channel.

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, a member of Iran’s parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy, accused the ambassador of organizing protests and called for his expulsion. Dozens of hard-liners later gathered outside the British Embassy, chanting “Death to England.” They also called for the ambassador to be expelled and the embassy to be closed.

Iranian media, meanwhile, focused on the admission of responsibility for the crash, with several newspapers calling for those responsible to apologize and resign.

The hard-line daily Vatan-e Emrouz bore the front-page headline “A sky full of sadness,” while the Hamshahri daily went with “Shame,” and the IRAN daily said “Unforgivable.”

Mehdi Karroubi, an opposition activist under house arrest, lashed out at Khamenei himself, saying that as commander in chief he was “directly responsible.”

“If you were aware and you let military and security authorities deceive people, then there is no doubt you lack the attributes of constitutional leadership,” he said in a statement.

Criticism of the supreme leader is punishable by up to two years in prison.

Tensions with the United States eased after the ballistic missile attack, when Trump declined to respond and welcomed Iran’s apparent decision to stand down.

The emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, met with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and other officials Sunday in Tehran. Qatar has warm relations with the U.S. and Iran.

Syrian Prime Minister Imad Khamis was also leading a high-level delegation to Iran, including the defense and foreign ministers. Syrian state media described it as an “important visit” in light of recent events, without elaborating. Iran is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad in his country’s civil war, and Soleimani had mobilized militias and coordinated military aid.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was also traveling to Iran, with plans to visit Saudi Arabia the following day. And Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Saudi Arabia for talks with King Salman as part of a tour of oil-producing Gulf Arab states aimed at promoting peace.

The Deadly Myth of the Border

“The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America”
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In my memories, the U.S.-Mexico border is always seen at night. I’m crossing home — how many times in my life? — through San Ysidro, Otay Mesa, Tecate, Mexicali. I’m bored, impatient, sometimes drunk in a rowdy car with more people than seats, other times sleepy after a vacation with my parents, still carrying Ensenada beach sand in my shoes. And suddenly there’s that border; bracing and somber; garishly lit; with its war-zone fencing and humorless guards. It does not exist in order to threaten me — I’m an American man, white, and with documents. Allegedly, it is my protection. But who, I have often wondered, takes comfort in the presence of razor wire?

Always near the car, a barefoot child selling pink chiclets. Or a teenage boy, sucking his checks, looking over his shoulder, testing his handholds on the fence. Men in white suits collecting change for charities. The limbless, in wheelchairs. Blanket vendors. Boys selling bottled water that is in reality tap water. A half-line floats up, from a poem I heard recently at a funeral, whose author I’ve never known: the grave has lost its victory / It is but crossing.

Listen to Luis Alberto Urrea tell the story of crossing la línea:

Border Patrol helicopters swoop and churn in the air all along the line. You can sit in the Mexican hills and watch them herd humans on the dusty slopes across the valley […] monstrous Dodge trucks speeding into and out of the landscape; uniformed men patrolling with flashlights, guns, and dogs; spotlights; running figures; lines of people hurried onto buses by armed guards; and the endless clatter of the helicopters with their harsh white beams. […] But the Mexicans keep on coming — and the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, the Panamanians, the Colombians. The seven-mile stretch of Interstate 5 nearest the Mexican border is, at times, so congested with Latin American pedestrians that it resembles a town square.

That passage, from Urrea’s book ”Across the Wire,” was published 25 years ago. Has the ensuing quarter-century of economic migration, through a militarized border-zone of escalating punishments, been enough time for the United States to have learned even one single thing about the migrants who journey here? Apparently, no. Our spastic and cruel obsession with inflicting increasing levels of pain on the people trying to cross our Southern border has become, if anything, our biggest bipartisan national achievement. There are pundits in the United States who wring their hands over our “political discourse,” and the alleged failures of civility between opposing political parties. So perhaps it will cheer those people to know that the creation of this humanitarian disaster in the borderlands has been an enterprise of both major political parties, a beacon of Washington consensus-building in which Barack Obama and Jeff Sessions can find some common ground.

The U.S.-Mexico border is President Trump’s signature issue, and yet his understanding of the human beings who cross that border is a scrub wasteland too desolate to be called a desert. It takes an unfathomably impoverished mind to transform asylum-seekers, seasonal workers, day laborers, women, and children — infants, even — into an invading army. “Bad hombres,” “rapists,” “animals,” muscled men who “look like they should be fighting for the UFC,” caravans funded by George Soros which conceal Middle Eastern terrorists — these are lies that must be told to justify separating children from their parents, warehousing them on concrete floors without soap or toothpaste, all for the administrative “crime” of having not-yet-properly-documented a migration in duress undertaken by their parents.

If what is happening on our Southern border is truly an “invasion,” one that has been ongoing for decades, then let’s follow the logic out: What exactly has this “army” achieved? What battles have its “soldiers” won? If migrants-without-papers from Central America and Mexico are hell-bent on American destruction, their guerilla methods of sabotage seem largely to involve harvesting strawberries, hanging drywall, dicing mirepoix in Michelin-starred restaurant kitchens, cleaning houses, pruning hedges, serving in the United States military, attending college, writing poetry, and paying billions into Social Security coffers never to be collected. These were not exactly the methods employed by the Visigoths when they sacked Rome.

There are criminals, of course, who cross the border with contraband, running drugs north or money and guns south. But anyone who fears drug cartels should understand that cartel violence is precisely what many of these migrants are fleeing from. It remains baffling to me that someone horrified by garish reporting on MS-13 would not also understand that the extortion and murders carried out by MS-13 are exactly what has caused many El Salvadorans to leave home. (And also, let’s recall, MS-13’s gang of murderers was born in the same place Stephen Miller was: Los Angeles.) It’s as though an American in a BarcaLounger in Dubuque, with Fox News on at full volume, is allowed to be afraid of a Central American gang war, but an actual family under threat from that war has no similar right.

The solution to our borderland crisis is not, and never will be, a wall. Some measure of historical knowledge helps make that clear, and an understanding the historical folly of our borderland policing can also point to a better way forward. This is why Greg Grandin’s recent book, “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,” comes at such an opportune time. It’s a book I would recommend to President Trump in particular, though of course he wouldn’t read it. In the end, the only advice to give a grown man who believes we require a 2,000-mile, 30-foot-high concrete wall to protect us from seven-year-old Guatemalan girls, is that he should stop leaving the house, lest he be assaulted by the specter of his own shadow.

Click here to read long excerpts from “The End of the Myth” at Google Books.

¤

For most of American history, the frontier wilderness — the land beyond our border — was imagined as a masculine proving ground, a place of “regeneration through violence,” as the historian Richard Slotkin terms it. In this myth, the white hunter-hero battles against the Indian in the name of settlement and civilization. Recall Presidents Reagan or George W. Bush, in boots and Wranglers against a ranch-land sky, rhetorically leveraging the rough justice of the Old West whenever they needed to transform the politics of bullying death into a morality play.

President Trump, by contrast, is too lazy to clear brush with an adopted cowboy swagger, and his administration’s border fantasies are mostly too unhinged to conform to the well-worn tropes of the “Old West.” But as Trump stands in his golf shoes at the Mar-a-Lago omelette bar, telephone-game mangling xenophobic anecdotes from that morning’s “Fox & Friends,” he has unwittingly invented a new American genre. Gone is the day of the Border Western. Now is the era of Border Horror.

Consider the rhetoric: we are under siege. We must retreat. We must fortify ourselves, behind the tallest walls. We must, in other words, take shelter and hide. This vision of America resembles nothing so much as a barely coherent spin-off of “The Walking Dead,” wherein a group of hounded and heroic survivors — in this case, the 300 million residents of the richest country on earth — are besieged by zombie hordes, in the form of women and children from the poorest countries in the hemisphere. The red-hatted MAGA crowd seem to imagine themselves tending the last flame of civilization, and as a result can’t be bothered by moral claims for the rights of zombies, or worry over the conditions the brain-eaters are imprisoned in, and refuse to feel any guilt about tearing the interloping undead away from their equally undead children. This is what regeneration through violence looks like when reborn as Border Horror: the zombies coming over the walls must be caged, fought, or killed, and nothing else.

It’s worth asking how we arrived at this era of Border Horror. Why has the world outside our borders grown so frightening to us, at this, the apex of our reach and power and wealth? Expansion of our influence into that world used to be imagined an end in itself. What Greg Grandin argues in “The End of the Myth” is that the United States has always “pushed outward and justified that push in moral terms, as beneficial equally for the people within and beyond the frontier.” Indeed, founding figures like Benjamin Franklin were “optimistic Promethean[s],” Grandin writes, who “imagined history as a propulsive movement across the sea and land, east to west.” Or, as President James Monroe succinctly put it, “the greater the expansion, the greater the advantage.” (To be clear: Grandin is describing the history of this expansionist attitude, not endorsing it.) This propulsive drive to push forward the American project accounts not just for territorial expansions like the Louisiana Purchase, but for the U.S.-Mexico border in its current iteration, the product of a land grab that cleaved Mexico in half in 1848 as the spoils of a manufactured war. “Politics,” Grandin argues, was long organized around “the promise of constant, endless expansion.”

So deep this expansionism in American history, that ideas of boundedness long remained the fringe bugbear of nativists of the Pat Buchanan ilk. “You don’t build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations,” Ronald Reagan said in 1980. “You document the undocumented workers and let them come in here with a visa for whatever length of time they want to stay.” (Grandin’s book spills over with unearthed gems like this, ripe for the Thanksgiving dinner table arguments.) If “America’s exceptionalism was born on a frontier thought to be endless,” as Grandin says, then President Trump’s embrace of “the wall” represents by contrast the mainstreaming of a fortress mentality once considered antithetical to the American identity. Every other president spoke of braving new frontiers. For Trump, the United States is nothing more than a condo development in which all the units have been sold, where preserving our gilt privilege comes at the cost of closing the doors, pulling the shades, and huddling forever in the dark.

On its face, the end of the frontier myth — by turns racist, genocidal, expropriative, and sentimental about the motives of its white settler-heroes — should be nothing to mourn. But as contradictory and violent as the frontier myth was, the doctrine of expansionism was the way America served to manage its unruliness. “For over a century, from Andrew Jackson forward, the country’s political leaders enjoyed the benefit of being able to throw its restless and angry citizens […] outward into campaigns against Mexicans, Native Americans, Filipinos, and Nicaraguans, among other enemies,” Grandin writes. The westward drive meant Indian removal and eventually war with Mexico. Later, what the Civil War cleaved apart an expansionist war with Spain in the Philippines was able to knit back together. “The War of 1898 and the serial wars that followed allowed southerners to reclaim admission into the nation without having to renounce their white supremacy,” Grandin argues. The pattern is clear: again and again, racial and social conflicts are pushed outward, deferred from one war into the next, until finally the new frontiers become Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the core of Grandin’s argument is this idea that a state of constant warfare, enabled by the frontier myth, meant that extremism always found an outlet beyond the line of American settlement. Each new expansion could expend the unresolved passions of the last expansion. But when that animating myth, however naïve or self-serving, falls away, what lies exposed at home are all of the contradictions the myth once deferred. Once “[e]xpansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy the interests, reconcile the contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger,” Grandin concludes, we’re left with Trumpism — “extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.”

We might, as a country, have moved beyond our frontier mythos in a more honest and self-reflective fashion, via a moral reckoning with our expansionist past, a collective renunciation of colonial land grabs and wars beyond our boundaries, and a new dedication to living within our borders as a nation devoted to racial and gender equality. What happened instead Grandin lays out in a brilliant, blistering summation near the end of his book:

For over a century, the frontier served as a powerful symbol of American universalism. It not only conveyed the idea that the country was moving forward but promised that the brutality involved in moving forward would be transformed into something noble. Frontier expansionism would break every paradox, reconcile every contradiction between, say, ideals and interests, virtue and ambition. Extend the sphere, and you will ensure peace, protect individual freedom, and dilute factionalism; you will create a curious, buoyant, resourceful people in thrall to no received doctrine, transcend regionalism, spread prosperity, and moved beyond racism. As horizons broaden, so will our love for the world’s people. As boundaries widen, so will our tolerance, the realization that humanity is our country. There was no problem caused by expansion that couldn’t be solved by more expansion. War-bred trauma could be rolled over into the next war; poverty would be alleviated by more growth.

But today the frontier is closed, the safety valve shut. Whatever metaphor one wants to use, the country has lived past the end of its myth. Where the frontier symbolized perennial rebirth, a culture in springtime, those eight [border wall] prototypes in Otay Mesa loom like tombstones. After centuries of fleeing forward across the blood meridian, all the things that expansion was supposed to preserve have been destroyed, and all the things it was meant to destroy have been preserved. Instead of peace, there’s endless war. Instead of a critical, resilient, and progressive citizenry, a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change, has taken hold. Factionalism congealed and won a national election.

This is as bracing an analysis of post-2016 America as any I have read. Grandin’s book is so sharply argued, so rooted in careful historical detail, so morally clear, that it makes a strong claim to be the most essential political text yet to emerge from the shock of Trump’s election.

¤

In the summer of 2019, Trump visited the border town of Calexico, California, a few miles from where I grew up. “We’re building a lot of wall,” Trump said. “We’re going to look at a piece of it today. And I was just told it had a tremendous — it’s had a tremendous impact already — the piece that we’re going to be looking at.”

In truth, substantial border fencing in Calexico has existed since 1945. In fact, as Grandin’s book reminded me, the physical structure of that Calexico fence — the wire mesh and fence posts — was recycled from the Crystal City Internment Camp, where Japanese Americans were confined during World War II. It’s unlikely, of course, that Trump is aware of any of the fence’s actual history, or the implicit critique repurposed internment camp fencing offers of his border policies.

On any number of occasions, Trump’s own advisors — blustering anti-immigrant hardasses like former chief of staff John Kelly — have tried to help Trump walk back the ludicrousness of a physical concrete wall across the entirety of the border, not on grounds of compassion or economic realism, but strictly because a border wall is the kind of policy solution that only makes sense if you’ve lived your entire life inside the gates of a country club. Trump has explicitly rejected every offer of education about his own policies: “An all concrete Wall was NEVER ABANDONED, as has been reported by the media,” he wrote on Twitter, in response to Kelly’s exceedingly gentle attempt to reframe Trump’s stupid, infeasible idea. A concrete wall, as a concept, is inarguably rhetorically and politically effective, which could lead a person to conclude that Trump knows the wall is ridiculous, but like any good con artist, has simply identified a grift that works. But I would venture to guess that Trump passionately and sincerely believes in his dumb idea.

President Trump wants a border wall where right now all that exists are mere hundreds of miles of fences, double-fences, fences out into the ocean, sensors, deep canals, boiling deserts, swift rivers, helicopters, SUVs, Border Patrol agents with night-vision goggles, vigilante racists self-deputized to patrol the scrublands, and forbidding mountain passes. He wants this wall because historically, he says, walls work. Historically, he is incorrect, but we shouldn’t pretend this border wall ever existed in the realm of an evidence-based history. There is no careful study of the Ming Dynasty happening inside of the Department of Homeland Security.

And yet, one consequence of the napalm of stupidity airdropped on our population daily from the White House has been a deforestation of conversation about any other subject besides the Trump administration. There’s always another dose of evil with which a Stephen Miller, a Kirstjen Nielsen, a Sarah Sanders, a Pompeo or Bolton has ravaged and burned the truth, and we feel duty-bound to attend to it. But it’s also true that in opposing Trump, we risk overstating, even increasing, his power and reach. One essential use of a historical analysis like Grandin’s is to reopen inquiry into lost possibilities, to pay attention to what the present has muted, to discover the hand of contingency in what is treated as inevitable.

Looked at historically, then, what you find is that the U.S.-Mexico border is only a burial ground because we have made it so. It is only a place where the Constitution is held in abeyance because we have allowed it to be. It is a place where Border Patrol agents can act with impunity precisely because we have blessed that impunity. And there is inhumanity at the border only because we have refused to treat people crossing the border as fully human.

Let’s return to the migrant — let’s put him or her or them at the center of a conversation we tend to have only in self-interested terms. We speak all the time of “our” laws, and these people who are “breaking” them. Or, if we are more generous, we speak of what these people can do for us — what labor or services they can perform inexpensively on our behalf. But what if we just consider, from their perspective, who these people are, and what they are doing? Luis Alberto Urrea writes:

Imagine how bad things get to make you leave behind your family, your friends, your lovers; your home, as humble as it might be; your church, say. Let’s take it further — you’ve said good-bye to the graveyard, the dog, the goat, the mountains where you first hunted, your grade school, your state, your favorite spot on the river where you fished and took time to think.

Then you come hundreds — or thousands — of miles across a territory unknown to you. […] You have walked, run, hidden in the backs of trucks, spent part of your precious money on bus fare. […] Various features of your journey north might include police corruption; violence in the forms of beating, rape, murder, torture, road accidents; theft; incarceration. Additionally, you might experience loneliness, fear, exhaustion, sorrow, cold, heat, diarrhea, thirst, hunger. There is no medical attention available to you. There isn’t even Kotex. […]

[In Tijuana,] [y]ou’re in the worst part of town, but you can comfort yourself — at least there are no death squads here. There are no torturers here, or bandit land barons riding into your house. There is the last barrier, you think, between you and the United States.

At the moment, that last barrier is playing the role of the worst barrier. Is that who we wish to be? There is no ethical teaching anywhere, secular or sectarian, for believers and unbelievers alike, that suggests that what we are doing at the border is admirable behavior for the powerful to show to the weak. There is certainly nothing in the Bible that says this is how you treat the poor, the stranger, the widow, or the orphan. But the choice between the teachings of Jesus, and the ramblings of Trump, is one the vast majority of evangelicals decided long ago in the president’s favor. This is the horror at our border: the poor will be offered no comfort. The meek will inherit the dirt.

This review originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Storms Sweep Southern U.S., Midwest as Death Toll Rises to 11

HOUSTON — Severe storms sweeping across southern portions of the U.S. and up into the Midwest were blamed Saturday in the deaths of at least 11 people, including two first responders, as high winds, tornadoes and unrelenting rain battered large swaths of the country.

Storm-related fatalities were reported in Texas due to icy weather, in Alabama from a deadly tornado and in Louisiana, where winds were so strong that a trailer home was lifted off its foundation and carried several hundred feet. A man drowned in Oklahoma and the storms even touched the Midwest with at least one death on an icy highway in Iowa. Hundreds of thousands of people were left without power from Texas to Ohio, parts of highways were closed in Oklahoma and Arkansas due to flooding and hundreds of flights were canceled at Chicago’s international airports.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson declared a state of emergency to assist crews working to restore power around the state.

Two first responders were killed and another was critically injured in Lubbock, Texas, Saturday morning after they were hit by a vehicle while working the scene of a traffic accident in icy conditions, officials said.

Police Officer Nicholas Reyna, 27, who had been with the department for one year, died at the scene. Firefighter Lt. David Hill, 39, was taken to a local hospital where he later died. Firefighter Matthew Dawson, 30, was hospitalized in critical condition.

Lubbock Police Chief Floyd Mitchell called it an “extremely tragic day” for the city.

“If people would respect road conditions, things like this wouldn’t have to happen,” said Lubbock Fire Chief Shaun Fogerson.

Another person had died in Texas Friday night when a car flipped into a creek in Dallas as severe thunderstorms passed through. Lightning from Friday’s stormy weather was suspected of causing fires that burned two houses but caused no injuries in the North Texas cities of Burleson and Mansfield.

A man drowned near Kiowa, Oklahoma, after he was swept away in floodwaters, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol said Saturday. Randall Hyatt, 58, of Wardville, was overwhelmed by rushing water while getting out of his stalled truck.

The Iowa State Patrol said roads were caked with ice early Saturday when a semitrailer on Interstate 80 overturned, killing a passenger in the truck east of Iowa City.

In Alabama, three people were confirmed killed near Carrollton in Pickens County, the National Weather Service in Birmingham tweeted. The Alabama Emergency Management Agency said the deaths were caused by an “embedded tornado within a long line of intense thunderstorms.”

Earlier Saturday, in northwestern Louisiana, firefighters found the bodies of Jerry W. Franks, 79, and Mary Sue Franks, 65, near their demolished trailer in Benton, the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office said via Facebook. The winds were so strong the home of the couple, who were the in-laws of a parish deputy, was moved 200 feet (61 meters) from its foundation.

Willie Davis owns a barn near where the Franks lived. He told KTBS-TV that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen storms like this.

“Four or five times that I’ve known that (storms) have been through they hit, tearing down trees and the barn and stuff like that,” Willie Davis said. “But that’s about all it normally does every time, … this is the first time we’ve had any casualties.”

The National Weather Service in Shreveport said a tornado with winds of around 135 mph (217 kph) had touched down in Bossier Parish. Drone footage showed smashed buildings, a large vehicle flipped on its side, toppled trees and debris scattered over a large area.

Also in Louisiana, Raymond Holden, 75, was killed in his bed when a tree fell on his home in Oil City, crushing him, according to the Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office.

About 67,000 customers were without power in Alabama on Saturday night, according to Alabama Power. PowerOutage.us said Georgia had about 98,000 power outages Saturday evening, with tens of thousands of outages also reported in Mississippi and Louisiana. Outages occurred from Texas to Ohio.

In Tennessee, damage was widespread throughout Shelby County, the state’s most populous county, which includes Memphis. There were numerous downed trees and power poles, some of which will need to be replaced, according to the utility.

The Oklahoma Department of Transportation said portions of several highways in the southeastern part of the state were closed due to flooding. The Arkansas Department of Transportation reported that portions of several state highways across the state, particularly in southeastern Arkansas, were closed due to downed trees, power lines and flooding.

Many streams were already at or near flood levels because of earlier storms, and heavy rains could lead to flash flooding across the region, forecasters said. Parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana were under flash flood warnings or watches on Saturday.

The storm, bringing the threat of ice and snow to the Chicago area, prompted the cancellation of more than 1,200 flights Saturday at Chicago’s two main airports. Most cancellations occurred at Chicago’s O’Hare International, according to the Chicago Department of Aviation’s online flight-tracking website.

The weather service issued a winter weather advisory, flood watch and lakeshore flood warning for the Chicago metropolitan area for Saturday and a winter storm warning for adjacent areas of northwestern Illinois.

___

AP writer Rick Callahan contributed from Indianapolis.

At Least 7 Dead as Severe Storm Plows Through Southern U.S.

BENTON, La. — Authorities say at least seven people have died as severe storms sweep across parts of the U.S. South, bringing high winds and unrelenting rain.

The National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama, said Saturday via Twitter that three people have been confirmed killed near Carrollton in Pickens County. The Alabama Emergency Management Agency said that an “embedded tornado within a long line of intense thunderstorms” caused the deaths.

Earlier Saturday, firefighters in Louisiana found the bodies of an elderly couple Saturday near their demolished trailer, the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office said via Facebook. The winds were so strong that the home was moved 200 feet from its foundation.

The deaths of the victims, who were the in-laws of a parish deputy, brings the storm-related toll in Louisiana to three after a 75-year-old man was killed in Oil City, according to the Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office. Raymond Holden was in bed when the tree fell on his home, crushing him.

Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Whittington told The Associated Press that a truck driver and a Benton police officer had a close call after being shocked by a downed power line.

“A power line was hanging across the road and an 18-wheeler truck ran into it and got hung up in it and the Benton officer got there to help him,” Whittington said. Both were expected to survive.

The National Weather Service in Shreveport estimated that a tornado, with about 135 mph (217 kph) winds, touched down in Bossier Parish.

Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas on Saturday morning were clear of the severe thunderstorms that had passed through the night before. One person died Friday night in Texas when a car flipped into a creek in Dallas. Additionally, lightning from Friday’s stormy weather is suspected of causing two house fires in the North Texas cities of Burleson and Mansfield. Officials said no one was injured.

Homes were damaged or destroyed in Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas on Friday, but no injuries were reported. Downed trees and power lines were widespread.

According to PowerOutage.us, Mississippi had more than 61,0000 power outages midday Saturday. About 35,000 customers were without power in Louisiana. In Tennessee, Memphis Light, Gas and Water said about 23,000 customers were without power Saturday morning. Damage was widespread throughout Shelby County, Tennessee’s most populous county that includes Memphis, including downed trees and power poles, some of which will need to be replaced, according to the utility.

Entergy Arkansas reported nearly 42,000 power outages Saturday morning, mostly in the southeastern part of the state. Southwestern Electric Power Co. reported nearly 5,000 customers in East Texas were without power Saturday morning.

The Oklahoma Department of Transportation reported Saturday morning that portions of several highways in the southeastern part of the state were closed due to flooding. The Arkansas Department of Transportation reported that portions of several state highways across the state, particularly in the southeastern portion of Arkansas were closed due to downed trees and power lines and to flooding.

On Alabama’s Gulf Coast, Baldwin County canceled school activities including sporting events for Saturday. The National Weather Service warned of high winds and flooding and the potential for 10-foot-high (3-meter-high) waves on beaches, where northern visitors escaping the cold are a common sight during the winter.

Many streams already are at or near flood levels because of earlier storms, and heavy rains could lead to flash flooding across the region, forecasters said. Parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana were under flash flood warnings or watches on Saturday.

The storm, bringing the threat of ice and snow to the Chicago area, prompted the cancellation of about 1,000 flights Saturday at Chicago’s two main airports.

The Chicago Department of Aviation’s online flight-tracking website showed that as of 10:30 a.m. Saturday about 950 flight cancellations were reported at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and more than 50 flights had been canceled at Midway International Airport.

Delays at O’Hare and Midway were averaging around 15 minutes, the department said.

The weather service issued a winter weather advisory, flood watch and lakeshore flood warning for the Chicago metropolitan area for Saturday and a winter storm warning for adjacent areas of northwestern Illinois.

The weather service said rain, possibly mixed with snow, freezing rain and sleet was expected through Saturday afternoon in the Chicago area before changing by evening over to snow and sleet, possibly mixed with freezing rain.

Breezy conditions were forecast with gusts as high as 45 mph (72 kph).

___

AP writer Juan A. Lozano contributed to this report from Houston. Rick Callahan contributed from Indianapolis.

White House Considering Dramatic Expansion of Travel Ban

WASHINGTON — The White House is considering dramatically expanding its much-litigated travel ban to additional countries amid a renewed election-year focus on immigration by President Donald Trump, according to six people familiar with the deliberations.

A document outlining the plans — timed to coincide with the third anniversary of Trump’s January 2017 executive order — has been circulating the White House. But the countries that would be affected if it moves forward are blacked out, according to two of the people, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the measure has yet to be finalized.

It’s unclear exactly how many countries would be included in the expansion if it proceeds, but two of the people said that seven countries — a majority of them Muslim — would be added to the list. The most recent iteration of the ban includes restrictions on five majority-Muslim nations: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as Venezuela and North Korea.

A different person said the expansion could include several countries that were covered in the first iteration of Trump’s ban, but later removed amid rounds of contentious litigation. Iraq, Sudan and Chad, for instance, had originally been affected by the order, which the Supreme Court upheld in a 5-4 vote after the administration released a watered-down version intended to withstand legal scrutiny.

Trump, who had floated a banning all Muslims from entering the country during his 2016 campaign, criticized his Justice Department for the changes, tweeting that DOJ “should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.”

The countries on the proposed expansion list include allies that fall short on certain security measures. The additional restrictions were proposed by Department of Homeland Security officials following a review of security protocols and “identity management” for about 200 countries, according to the person.

White House House spokesman Hogan Gidley declined to confirm the plan, but praised the travel ban for making the country safer.

“The Travel Ban has been very successful in protecting our Country and raising the security baseline around the world,” he said in a statement. “While there are no new announcements at this time, common-sense and national security both dictate that if a country wants to fully participate in U.S. immigration programs, they should also comply with all security and counter-terrorism measures — because we do not want to import terrorism or any other national security threat into the United States.”

Several of the people said they expected the announcement to be timed to coincide with the third anniversary of Trump’s first, explosive travel ban, which was announced without warning on Jan. 27, 2017 — days after Trump took office. That order sparked an uproar, with massive protests across the nation and chaos at airports where passengers were detained.

The current ban suspends immigrant and non-immigrant visas to applicants from the affected countries, but it allows exceptions, including for students and those who have established “significant contacts” in the U.S.. And it represents a significant softening from Trump’s initial order, which had suspended travel from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen for 90 days, blocked refugee admissions for 120 days and suspended travel from Syria.

That order was immediately blocked by the courts, prompting a months-long effort by the administration to develop clear standards and federal review processes to try to withstand legal muster. Under the current system, restrictions are targeted at countries the Department of Homeland Security says fail to share sufficient information with the U.S. or haven’t taken necessary security precautions, such as issuing electronic passports with biometric information and sharing information about travelers’ terror-related and criminal histories.

The new proposal was also quickly drawing sharp criticism.

“Different Muslim Ban – same xenophobic Administration,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. “An expanded Muslim Ban will worsen our relationships with countries around the world. It won’t do anything to make our country safer. It will harm refugees, alienate our allies and give extremists propaganda for recruitment.”

An official with Refugees International, a nonprofit that advocates for the displaced worldwide, said the news was very disappointing.

“The news that President Trump is planning to add countries to his travel ban should be heartbreaking to all Americans,” said U.S. Senior Advocate Yael Schacher. “Thousands of people have been cruelly and unreasonably separated from relatives because of the already existing ban. They have been stranded in conflict zones like Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. This is a shameful attempt by the President to misuse his power to expand a ban that principally impacts individuals from the Muslim world.”

Under the existing order, Cabinet secretaries are also required to update the president regularly on whether countries are abiding by the new immigration security benchmarks. Countries that fail to comply risk new restrictions and limitations, while countries that comply can have their restrictions lifted.

The discussions come as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi prepares to transmit to the Senate the articles of impeachment the Democratic-led House passed against Trump late last year, launching a formal impeachment trial just as the 2020 election year gets underway. Trump in December became just the third president in history to be impeached by the House. The Republican-controlled Senate is not expected to remove him from office.

Trump ran his 2016 campaign promising to crack down on illegal immigration and spent much of his first term fighting lawsuits trying to halt his push to build a wall along the southern border, prohibit the entry of citizens from several majority-Muslim countries and crack down on migrants seeking asylum in the U.S., amid other measures.

He is expected to press those efforts again this year as he ramps up his reelection campaign and works to energize his base with his signature issue, inevitably stoking Democratic anger.

Just this week, a coalition of leading civil rights organizations urged House leaders to take up the No Ban Act, legislation to end Trump’s travel ban and prevent a new one.

The bill introduced last year by Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., with Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., in the Senate, would impose limits on the president’s ability to restrict entry to the U.S. It would require the administration to spell out its reasons for the restrictions and specifically prohibit religious discrimination.

___

Lemire reported from New York. Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Colleen Long contributed to this report from Washington.

Under Pressure, Iran Admits It Shot Down Jetliner by Mistake

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on Saturday acknowledged that it accidentally shot down the Ukrainian jetliner that crashed earlier this week, killing all 176 people aboard, after the government had repeatedly denied Western accusations and mounting evidence that it was responsible.

The plane was shot down early Wednesday, hours after Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on two military bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq in retaliation for the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in an American airstrike in Baghdad. No one was hurt in the attack on the U.S. bases.

The admission raised a host of new questions, such as why Iran did not shut down its international airport or airspace when it was bracing for a U.S. reprisal. It also undermined the credibility of information provided by senior officials, who for three days had adamantly dismissed allegations of a missile strike as Western propaganda.

Iran’s acknowledgment also alters the narrative around its confrontation with the U.S. in a way that could anger the Iranian public. Iran had promised harsh revenge after Soleimani’s death, but instead of killing American soldiers, its forces downed a civilian plane in which most passengers were Iranian and none survived.

Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Guard’s aerospace division, said his unit accepts full responsibility for the shootdown. In an address broadcast by state TV, he said that when he learned about the downing of the plane, “I wished I was dead.”

He said he raised the possibility to his superiors that his forces shot down the plane as early as Wednesday morning because “the simultaneous occurrence of the launch and crash was suspicious.”

Hajizadeh said Guard forces ringing the capital had beefed up their air defenses and were at the “highest level of readiness,” fearing that the U.S. would retaliate. He said he suggested Tehran should close its airspace but no action was taken.

He said the airline’s pilot and crew had done nothing wrong, but an officer made the “bad decision” to open fire on the plane after mistaking it for a cruise missile.

“We were prepared for an all-out conflict,” he said.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, expressed his “deep sympathy” to the families of the victims and called on the armed forces to “pursue probable shortcomings and guilt in the painful incident.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the crash investigation should continue and the “perpetrators” should be brought to justice. He said Iran should compensate victims’ families, and he requested “official apologies through diplomatic channels.”

The Ukrainian airline criticized Iran’s decision to leave its airspace open despite the hostilities.

“It’s absolutely irresponsible,” Ukraine International Airlines vice president Ihor Sosnovskiy told reporters. “There must be protection around ordinary people. If they are shooting somewhere from somewhere, they are obliged to close the airport.”

Iranians had rallied around their leaders after the killing of Soleimani, who was seen as a national icon for building up armed groups across the region that project Iranian influence and battle the Islamic State group and other perceived enemies.

Hundreds of thousands had attended funeral processions across the country in a show of support for the Islamic Republic just weeks after authorities had quashed protests ignited by a hike in gasoline prices. Iran has been in the grip of a severe economic crisis since President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 nuclear deal and imposed crippling sanctions.

The shootdown of the plane and the lack of transparency around it, along with the restrained response to the killing of Soleimani, could reignite anger at the country’s leadership.

On Saturday night, hundreds gathered at universities in Tehran to protest the government’s late acknowledgement of the plane being shot down. They demanded officials involved in the missile attack be removed from their positions and tried. Police broke up the demonstrations.

The plane, en route to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, was carrying 167 passengers and nine crew members from several countries, including 82 Iranians, 57 Canadians — including many Iranians with dual citizenship — and 11 Ukrainians, according to officials.

President Hassan Rouhani acknowledged Iran’s responsibility but blamed the downing of the plane in part on “threats and bullying” by the United States after the killing of Soleimani. He expressed condolences, calling for a full investigation and the prosecution of those responsible.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also deflected some of the blame, tweeting that “human error at time of crisis caused by US adventurism led to disaster.”

The jetliner, a Boeing 737, went down on the outskirts of Tehran shortly after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport.

The U.S. and Canada, citing intelligence, said they believed Iran shot down the aircraft with a surface-to-air missile, a conclusion supported by videos verified by The Associated Press.

“This is the right step for the Iranian government to admit responsibility, and it gives people a step toward closure with this admission,” said Payman Parseyan, a prominent Iranian-Canadian in western Canada who lost a number of friends in the crash.

“I think the investigation would have disclosed it whether they admitted it or not. This will give them an opportunity to save face.”

As recently as Friday, Ali Abedzadeh, the head of the national aviation department, had told reporters “with certainty” that a missile had not caused the crash.

On Thursday, Cabinet spokesman Ali Rabiei dismissed reports of a missile, saying they “rub salt on a painful wound” for families of the victims.

Iran had invited Ukraine, Canada, the United States and France to take part in the investigation of the crash, in keeping with international norms. The Boeing 737 was built in the United States and the engine was built by a U.S.-French consortium.

Ukraine’s president said its team of investigators, who are already on the ground in Iran, should continue their work with “full access and cooperation.”

Rouhani spoke Saturday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and said the investigation was progressing rapidly. His website quoted him accusing the United States of driving the situation in the Middle East to a “dangerous level” and said all should try to return “full stability and security” to the region.

Trudeau said his country would remain focused on getting justice, closure, accountability and transparency for the families.

Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported that the supreme leader on Friday morning had ordered top security officials to review the crash and announce the results.

“If some individuals, in any position, were aware of the issue but made statements contradicting the reality or hid the truth for any reason, they should be named and tried,” said Fars, which is close to the Guard.

Others speculated that the security forces may have concealed information from civilian authorities.

“Concealing the truth from the administration is dreadful,” Mohammad Fazeli, a sociology professor in Tehran, wrote on social media. “If it had not been concealed, the head of civil aviation and the government spokesmen would not have persistently denied it.”

“Concealing the truth for three days is dangerous,” he added.

___

Krauss reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, Rob Gillies in Toronto, Jim Heintz in Moscow and Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.

America Could Look Like Hungary if Trump Is Re-Elected

Now that we’ve entered an election year, there is a lot of speculation about what America could look like if Donald Trump gets another term, by hook or by crook. As Trump uses a crisis he created in the Middle East to distract us from impeachment, increases his chances of reelection, and boosts the fortunes of his buddies in the Military-Industrial Complex, it’s important to understand how other demagogic leaders consolidate their power.

Steve Bannon has said that Hungary’s strongman prime minister Viktor Orbán was “Trump before Trump.”

In August of 1989, my best friend Jerry Schneiderman and I spent the better part of a week sitting in outdoor cafes on the Buda side of the Danube River, eating extraordinary (and cheap!) food, staying in a grand old hotel, and generally exploring Budapest.

Two months earlier, there had been massive pro-democracy demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people, demanding that the Soviet Union let Hungary go. The summer we were there, over a quarter-million showed up in Heroes’ Square for the reinterment of the body of Imre Nagy, a hero of the ill-fated 1956 rebellion against the USSR. The final speaker was 26-year-old Viktor Orbán, a rising politician who would soon be a member of Parliament. To an explosion of enthusiastic cheers, Orbán defied the Soviets (the only speaker to overtly do so) and openly called for “the swift withdrawal of Russian troops.”

Nine months later, in March of 1990, Hungary held its first real elections since 1945; in 1999, it joined NATO; and in 2004, it became a member of the European Union.

For 20 years, Hungary was a functioning democracy; today, it’s a corrupt oligarchy.

In nine short years since he was elected in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, now fabulously wealthy by Hungarian standards and an oligarch himself, succeeded in transforming his nation’s government from a functioning European democracy into an autocratic and oligarchic regime of single-party rule.

Orbán took over the Fidesz Party, once a conventional “conservative” political party, with the theme of restoring “Christian” purity and making “Hungary great again.” His rallies regularly draw tens of thousands.

He campaigned on building a wall across the entirety of Hungary’s southern border, a promise he has largely kept.

He altered the nation’s Constitution to do what we’d call gerrymandering and voter suppression, ensuring that his party, Fidesz, would win more than two-thirds of the votes in pretty much every federal election well into the future.

He’s now packed the courts so thoroughly that legal challenges against him and his party go nowhere.

His party has rewritten grade school textbooks to say that refugees entering the country are a threat because “it can be problematic for different cultures to coexist.” Using this logic, he has locked up refugee children in cages.

When the Hungarian Helsinki Committee said “the indefinite detention of many vulnerable migrants, including families with small children, is cruel and inhuman,” Orbán said the influx of Syrian refugees seeking asylum “poses a security risk and endangers the continent’s Christian culture and identity.” He added, “Immigration brings increased crime, especially crimes against women, and lets in the virus of terrorism.”

Five years and one week before American Nazis rallied in Charlottesville and , a group of some 700 right-wing “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting “We will set your homes on fire!” Orbán’s police watched without intervening. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.” Orbán refused to condemn him or the anti-Roma violence.

Orbán has handed government contracts to his favored few, elevating an entire new class of pro-Orbán businesspeople who are in the process of cementing control of the nation’s economy, as those who opposed him have lost their businesses, been forced to sell their companies, and often fled the country.

Virtually the entire nation’s press is now in the hands of oligarchs and corporations loyal to him, with talk radio and television across the country singing his praises daily. Billboards and social media proclaim his patriotism. His media allies are now reaching out to purchase media across the rest of Europe to spread his right-wing message.

Last year he began dismantling the Hungarian Science Academy, replacing or simply firing scientists who acknowledge climate change, which he has called “left-wing trickery made up by Barack Obama.”

The world, in particular the EU, has watched this nine-year political nightmare with increasing alarm, and even the EU’s 2015 and 2018 attempts to essentially impeach Orbán have backfired, increasing his two reelection margins as his handmaids in the media proclaim him a victim of a European “deep state” and meddling foreigners, particularly George Soros (who, ironically, once paid for a young Orbán to study in Britain).

While he blasts Soros and his own country’s Jewish leaders with anti-Semitic tropes, he was feted by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who called him “a true friend of Israel.” Orbán replied, “A Hungarian patriot and a Jewish Israeli patriot will always find something in common.”

In May, the same month Rudy Giuliani said he had a former Ukrainian prosecutor willing to testify that Joe Biden was corrupt, Donald Trump invited Orbán to the White House for a state visit; Orbán has been one of Trump’s two primary sources of information about how Ukraine opposed or tried to sabotage the U.S. president.

In a rally three months before his White House meeting, Orbán said that countries that accept refugees are producing “mixed-race nations.”

Orbán is now back in Hungary, ruthlessly using his own nation’s diplomatic and criminal justice systems to aid foreign criminal oligarchs, having hired his own local versions of Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo.

Before you say, “It can’t happen here,” you may want to make a trip to Budapest.

This article was produced by Economy for All , a project of the Independent Media Institute

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 25 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

Trump Ups Iran Accusations: Four U.S. Embassies Targeted

WASHINGTON — Confronted by persistent questions about his military action in the Middle East, President Donald Trump and his top officials offered a string of fresh explanations Friday, with Trump now contending Iranian militants had planned major attacks on four U.S. embassies.

Just hours earlier, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had said the U.S. didn’t know when or where attacks might occur. Trump and other officials insisted anew that Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani had posed an imminent threat to the U.S., but they rebuffed repeated attempts to explain what they meant by “imminent.”

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Trump, meanwhile, announced additional sanctions against Iran, which he had promised after a barrage of missiles fired by the Islamic State against American bases in Iraq earlier this week.

Those Iranian missiles, which caused no casualties, were prompted in turn by the U.S. drone strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani last week in Baghdad. That U.S. assault set off a chain of events that may have included the downing of a Ukrainian jetliner, possibly by an Iranian missile, and calls by the Iraqi government to expel U.S. troops from their country.

At the White House, Trump issued an executive order adding additional U.S. sanctions to the already long list his administration had imposed in an effort to force Iran to accept a new agreement that would curb its nuclear program and to halt support for militant groups throughout the Middle East.

Trump declared the U.S. was holding Iran responsible for attacks against the United States as well as a threat to U.S. service members, diplomats and civilians — an apparent reference to the justification for killing Soleimani.

“The United States will continue to counter the Iranian regime’s destructive and destabilizing behavior,” he said.

But Trump and others faced continuing questions over their claims of an “imminent” threat. Members of Congress said Pompeo and other officials did not provide sufficient detail or justification in briefings this week.

Define what you mean by imminent, Pompeo was asked Friday at a White House news conference.

“I don’t know exactly which minute,” Pompeo said. “We don’t know exactly which day it would have been executed, but it was very clear. Qassem Soleimani himself was plotting a broad, large-scale attack against American interests and those attacks were imminent.”

Both Pompeo and Trump had said U.S. embassies were threatened. The secretary of state broadened it to include “American facilities,” including military bases throughout the region. “This was going to happen, and American lives were at risk,” he said.

Trump was gave a more worrisome number but still no specifics in a later comment.

“I can reveal that I believe it probably would’ve been four embassies,” he told Fox News in an interview taped Friday and scheduled to air later that night.

He spoke amid revelations by U.S. officials that the American military had tried, but failed, to kill another senior Iranian commander on the same day that Soleimani was killed. The targeting of Abdul Reza Shahlai was apparently part of an effort to cripple the leadership of Iran’s Quds force, which the U.S. has designated a terror organization along with the larger Islamic Revolutionary Guard Force.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the killing of Soleimani “provocative and disproportionate,” a nd other members said they were unconvinced after a closed-door briefing on the intelligence.

“President Trump recklessly assassinated Qasem Soleimani,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat. “He had no evidence of an imminent threat or attack.”

The new sanctions were in immediate response to Iran’s firing of a barrage of missiles at American bases in neighboring Iraq this week after to the killing of Soleimani. No one was injured. The larger U.S. goal is to force Iran to negotiate a new agreement on limiting its nuclear program.

In 2018, Trump withdrew from the nuclear agreement signed under President Barack Obama that traded curbs on the program for the easing of sanctions. Since then, the administration has added additional economic measures that have created hardship in Iran and brought its oil revenue to historic lows but have failed to bring the Iranian government to the negotiating table.

The sanctions added Friday include measures aimed at eight senior Iranian officials involved in what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called “destabilizing” activities throughout the Middle East as well as Tuesday’s missile barrage.

Those measures, which would freeze any assets the officials have in U.S. jurisdiction and prohibit financial transactions with them, are largely symbolic since such senior figures are unlikely to have assets under American control after decades of hostility between the two nations.

But other measures announced Friday could have a significant effect on strategically important sectors of the Iranian economy, said Ben Davis, chief research officer at research and data analytics firm Kharon.

The executive order grants the administration power to place anyone involved, even indirectly, in the construction, manufacturing, textile or mining sector on a global financial blacklist. It also targets 17 of the largest steel and iron manufacturers — one of the few growth spots in the hobbled Iranian economy — along with three foreign companies, including two based in China, under secondary sanctions.

“It sends a signal to other foreign firms that continue to do business with Iranian steel producers that this is off limits,” said Davis, a former Treasury Department official.

Adnan Mazarei, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the sanctions will hurt an Iranian economy that was forced to cut fuel subsidies earlier this year, triggering nationwide protests, but they also will make it harder for government to negotiate with the U.S.

“This will be seen as another sign that the U.S. government cannot be taken at its word when it says it wants to negotiate,” Mazarei said.

Mnuchin insisted the sanctions are working and have deprived Iran of tens of billions of dollars. “They would be using that for terrorist activities throughout the region and to enable them to do more bad things,” he said. “And there’s no question, by cutting off the economics to the region, we are having an impact.”

___

Associated Press writer Chris Rugaber contributed to this report.

Sanders Campaign Says ‘Bring It’ Following Trump’s Attacks

After President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign used its massive email list to go after potential 2020 rival Sen. Bernie Sanders on two consecutive days this week, team Sanders welcomed the president’s attacks as a sign that he views the Vermont senator as a serious threat to his hopes for a second term.

In an email Wednesday attacking Sanders for condemning the likely illegal U.S. assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, Trump described the senator as “Democrats’ 2020 front-runner” and accused him of repeating “talking points straight from Iran’ Ayatollahs.”

“Bring it,” Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss tweeted in response to the email blast, which appeared to mark the first time of the 2020 cycle that Trump’s campaign has used its list to hit the Vermont senator.

Following the Trump campaign’s second email of the week—headlined, “FACT: Bernie Sanders Is A Wealthy, Fossil Fuel-Guzzling Millionaire”—Sanders said “Donald Trump is attacking us because he knows we will beat him in the general election.”

Donald Trump is attacking us because he knows we will beat him in the general election. https://t.co/v04E11RRop

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 9, 2020

 

Sanders staffers echoed the senator’s response to the Trump campaign’s attacks, which come less than a month ahead of the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses.

“The Trump campaign knows that Bernie is their biggest threat,” tweeted Bill Neidhardt, Sanders’ Iowa deputy state director.

National polls and surveys of key states have consistently shown Sanders outperforming Trump in hypothetical general election match-ups. Sanders has also been surging in recent Democratic primary polls, as the senator’s speechwriter David Sirota pointed out Thursday.

“It is not a coincidence that Trump suddenly began attacking Bernie the same week this national poll came out showing Bernie now in first place in the Democratic primary race,” Sirota tweeted, citing a Reuters/Ipsos survey that put Sanders at the top of the Democratic field, two percentage points ahead of former Vice President Joe Biden.