Chris Hedges's Blog, page 588

New Fissure Spatters Lava From Hawaii Volcano

VOLCANO, Hawaii—The Latest on the eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii (all times local):

9:45 a.m.

A new lava fissure has opened up on Hawaii’s Big Island in the vicinity of a geothermal energy plant.

The U.S. Geological Survey said minor lava spatter erupted from the new fissure Saturday morning, which brings the total number of fissures to 16.

The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory reports the fissure opened 1 mile (1.6 kilometer) northeast of the last fissure and east of the Puna Geothermal Venture plant.

No significant lava flow has been reported so far.

Plant workers this week removed the 50,000 gallons of pentane stored at the site as a precaution.

Geologists warn that the Kilauea volcano could shoot out large boulders and ash out of its summit crater.

President Donald Trump on Friday declared a major disaster exists on the Big Island.

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5:55 a.m.

Hawaii tourism officials are hoping Kilauea’s eruption won’t deter travelers from visiting the state’s largest island, even as geologists warn the volcano could soon shoot large boulders out of its summit.

Travel industry executives note most of the Big Island is free of eruption threats from Kilauea, which began spurting lava into a residential neighborhood last week.

George Szigeti, CEO of the Hawaii Tourism Authority says Kilauea is being monitored constantly and says the Big Island is “immense” and there are large parts that are unaffected by the volcano.

President Donald Trump on Friday declared a major disaster exists on the Big Island. The move will make federal financial assistance available to state and local governments as they repair roads, public parks, schools and water pipes damaged by the eruption.

A Surprising Bullying Battleground: Senior Centers

SAN FRANCISCO — The unwanted were turned away from cafeteria tables. Fistfights broke out at karaoke. Dances became breeding grounds for gossip and cruelty.

It became clear this place had a bullying problem on its hands. What many found surprising was that the perpetrators and victims alike were all senior citizens.

Nursing homes, senior centers and housing complexes for the elderly have introduced programs, training and policies aimed at curbing spates of bullying, an issue once thought the exclusive domain of the young.

“There’s the clique system just like everywhere else,” said Betsy Gran, who until recently was assistant director at San Francisco’s 30th Street Senior Center. “It’s like ‘Mean Girls,’ but everyone is 80.”

After the cafeteria exiles and karaoke brouhahas, the 30th Street Center teamed up with a local nonprofit, the Institute on Aging, to develop an anti-bullying program. All staff members received 18 hours of training that included lessons on what constitutes bullying, causes of the problem and how to manage such conflicts. Seniors were then invited to similar classes, held in English and Spanish, teaching them to alert staff or intervene themselves if they witness bullying. Signs and even place mats around the center now declare it a “Bully Free Zone.”

“I think in the past I would have just stayed out of it,” said Mary Murphy, 86, a retired real estate agent who took the classes. “Now I might be inclined to help.”

Robin Bonifas, a social work professor at Arizona State University and author of the book “Bullying Among Older Adults: How to Recognize and Address an Unseen Epidemic,” said existing studies suggest about 1 in 5 seniors encounters bullying. She sees it as an outgrowth of frustrations characteristic in communal settings, as well a reflection of issues unique to getting older. Many elderly see their independence and sense of control disappear and, for some, becoming a bully can feel like regaining some of that lost power.

“It makes them feel very out of control,” Bonifas said, “and the way they sort of get on top of things and make their name in this new world is intimidating, picking on people, gossiping.”

There is far less recognition of bullying as a problem among seniors compared with young people. Even among those who have been called bullies, many are unaware how problematic their behavior is until it’s labeled. Campaigns around the country have sought to spread the word, including a booklet circulated last year by the National Center for Assisted Living.

“In the life cycle, it doesn’t go away,” said Katherine Arnold, a member of the city Human Rights Commission in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, which created a public service announcement on its community-access station that included a portrayal of a man who was excluded from a card game and became the subject of gossip by other seniors. “There’s really not a lot of escape.”

Most senior bullying isn’t physical but rather involves name-calling, rumors and exclusion, said Pamela Countouris, a longtime schoolteacher who now runs a Pittsburgh-based consultancy that offers training on bullying. Women constitute the bulk of the bullies Countouris encounters among seniors, a reflection of lifespan disparities and the gender makeup of those who live at or participate in programs at senior facilities.

Countouris’ business began with a focus on school bullying but now centers exclusively on seniors. In the next month alone, she has more than a dozen training sessions planned.

After four years immersed in the wrath of older bullies, Countouris has heard all manner of stories. At a senior high-rise, a woman who saw herself as the queen of the parking garage would key the cars of those who crossed her. Elsewhere, laundry rooms became vicious places where the bullied had their detergent stolen and their clothes thrown on the floor. Bingo rooms so often devolved into battlefields — with lucky newcomers badgered and accused of cheating by veteran players — she came to call it “the devil’s game.”

“I didn’t realize it was an underground society where people could be mean to each other,” Countouris said.

In the worst cases, bullying goes far beyond bingo squabbles. Marsha Wetzel moved into a senior apartment complex in Niles, Illinois, after her partner of 30 years died and her partner’s family evicted her from the home the couple shared. At Glen St. Andrew Living Community, she said she was met with relentless bullying by residents mostly focused on her being a lesbian.

One man hit Wetzel’s scooter with his walker and unleashed a barrage of homophobic slurs. A woman rammed her wheelchair into Wetzel’s table in the dining room and knocked it over, warning “homosexuals will burn in hell.” In the mailroom, someone knocked her in the head, and in an elevator, she was spit on.

“I’d just go in my room and barricade my door and just pray,” said Wetzel, now 70 and living at a senior complex in Chicago. “I just felt like a slug, like I was nothing, like I wasn’t even human.”

Lambda Legal, which defends LGBTQ rights, took on Wetzel’s case and sued Glen St. Andrew, claiming Fair Housing Act violations. A federal judge dismissed the suit last year. An appeals court decision is pending.

Wetzel had seen such bullying throughout her life. She dropped out of high school when she became a punching bag for the girls who learned she was a lesbian. As a senior, she said, it felt even more traumatic — and the bullies even more vicious. She had a view of a cemetery from her window and would stare at it, thinking maybe only when she arrived there would she find peace.

“I felt like a person in a pool of piranhas,” she said.

Macron Defiant After Paris Stabbing Is Claimed by Islamic State

PARIS — The Latest on a knife attack in Paris (all times local):

12:20 a.m.

President Emmanuel Macron says France will not cede to “enemies of freedom” after a Paris stabbing attack claimed by the Islamic State group.

Macron tweeted his praise for police who “neutralized the terrorist” and his thoughts for the victims. A knife-wielding man killed one person and injured four during the Saturday night attack in a busy Right Bank neighborhood. Police say they killed a suspect.

Counterterrorism authorities are leading the investigation of the attack.

France has been repeatedly targeted by IS and experienced multiple deadly attacks. France’s military is active in the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

Macron said: “France is once again paying the price of blood, but will not cede an inch to enemies of freedom.”

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12:10 a.m.

The Islamic State group’s news agency claims that a man who stabbed five people in Paris was a “soldier” of the extremist movement.

The Aamaq news agency said in a statement early Sunday that the assailant carried out the Saturday night attack in response to the Islamic State group’s calls for supporters to target members of the U.S.-led military coalition squeezing the extremists out of Iraq and Syria.

France’s military has been active in the coalition since 2014.

One person was killed and four injured in Saturday’s attack.

The Aamaq statement did not provide evidence for its claim or details on the identity of the assailant, who was apparently killed by police.

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11:55 a.m.

French authorities have opened a terrorism investigation after a knife-wielding assailant killed one person and injured four others in the center of Paris.

The Paris prosecutor says counterterrorism authorities are investigating Saturday’s attack in a busy neighborhood of Paris’ Right Bank. The alleged attacker was killed by police.

Prosecutor Francois Molins said witnesses reported that the suspect shouted “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great” in Arabic.

Molins told reporters that based on the method of the attack, counterterrorism authorities are leading the investigation on potential charges of murder and attempted murder in connection with terrorist motives.

The Islamic State group news agency claimed the suspect as one of its “soldiers” on Saturday night.

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10:35 p.m.

French authorities say a knife-wielding assailant killed one person and injured four in the center of Paris before being killed by police.

Paris police tweeted that the attack occurred Saturday evening in the 2nd arrondissement or district of the French capital. Police said the person armed with the knife targeted five people, killing one and seriously injuring two and lightly injuring the other two.

Paris police said the attacker died. Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said the alleged attacker was “neutralized” by police and praised officers for their actions.

The identity of the attack suspect and reason for the attack are unclear.

Paris has been under higher security in recent years after a string of deadly Islamic extremist attacks.

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10:25 p.m.

French authorities are denouncing a knife attack in central Paris that French media say left two dead including the assailant.

The Paris police said the attacker was subdued by officers during the stabbing attack in the 2nd arrondissement or district of the French capital Saturday. The police said the attacker was armed with a knife, but gave no other details.

French media reported that two people are dead, and BFM television said one of them is the alleged attacker. The motive or reason for the attack was unclear.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb denounced the “odious attack” in a tweet. Paris has been under higher security in recent years after a string of deadly Islamic extremist attacks.

Poor People’s Campaign Aims to Bring MLK’s Dream to Fruition

On Monday, thousands of activists will gather at the U.S. Capitol and in more than 30 cities across the nation to kick off the revival of the Poor People’s Campaign, a radical civil disobedience movement that aims to bring the issue of poverty to the center of the political agenda.

Inspired by a 1968 initiative organized by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the campaign will involve 40 days of protests to highlight the issues of racism, poverty, environmental destruction, the war economy and militarism. The movement’s organizers say it will be one of the largest waves of nonviolent protest and direct action in national history, largely motivated by the plight of the estimated 41 million Americans who live below the official poverty line. The organizers say the official measure of poverty is too narrow, that the number of poor Americans is about 140 million if food, clothing and housing costs are taken into account.

The campaign’s official demands include federal and state living-wage laws, an end to anti-union and anti-workers’ rights efforts, welfare programs for the poor, equity in education, Medicaid expansion, accessible housing and more.

“The truth is that economic insecurity, poverty and misery are affecting more of us in 2018 than we are made aware,” according to the campaign’s website. “We remain in the dark about who is poor and this ignorance prevents us from being able to address the broad and deep poverty in our midst. We have the right to know the true state of our Union.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was involved in the campaign’s first iteration, wrote for CNN:

Fifty years later, a new movement of the locked out is rising. It is right on time. Everything we worked for—and too many of us died for—during the civil rights movement is under attack. Voting rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, access to affordable health care, housing, education, the air we breathe and the water we drink are in peril. …

Rooted in faith, love and a rock-solid belief and commitment to nonviolence, the campaign co-chairs are two incredible patriots, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary and the Rev. William Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach, a nonpartisan social justice organization.

When the new Poor People’s Campaign hits the streets, I will proudly join them.

In order to provide our readers with comprehensive coverage of the Poor People’s Campaign, Truthdig is launching its first fully reader-funded project. With readers’ support, we will be able to provide firsthand accounts of the people and actions involved in addressing some of the most pressing issues of our time. Please check back on Monday for our live blog coverage of the campaign’s first meeting, in Washington, D.C.

Trump Welcomes N. Korea Plan to Blow Up Nuclear-Site Tunnels

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Saturday that it will dismantle its nuclear test site in less than two weeks, in a dramatic event that would set up leader Kim Jong Un’s summit with President Donald Trump next month. Trump welcomed the “gracious gesture.”

In a statement carried by state media, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said all of the tunnels at the country’s northeastern testing ground will be destroyed by explosion, and observation and research facilities and ground-based guard units will also be removed.

Kim had already revealed plans to shut the test site by the end of May during his summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in last month. Analysts say that while the closure of the site is important, it doesn’t represent a material step toward full denuclearization.

“A ceremony for dismantling the nuclear test ground is now scheduled between May 23 and 25,” depending on weather, the Foreign Ministry’s statement said, adding that journalists from the United States, South Korea, China, Russia and Britain will be invited to witness the dismantling.

The ministry said the North will continue to “promote close contacts and dialogue with the neighboring countries and the international society so as to safeguard peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and over the globe.”

Trump, in a tweet Saturday, thanked North Korea for its plan to dismantle the nuclear test site, calling it “a very smart and gracious gesture!”

Following the Moon-Kim meeting, Moon’s office said Kim was willing to disclose the process to international experts, but the North’s statement Saturday didn’t address allowing experts on the site.

South Korea had no immediate response to the statement.

The North’s announcement comes days after Washington announced that the historic summit between Kim and Trump will be held June 12 in Singapore.

South Korea has said Kim has genuine interest in dealing away his nuclear weapons in return for economic benefits. However, there are lingering doubts about whether Kim would ever agree to fully relinquish the weapons he probably views as his only guarantee of survival.

During their meeting at a border truce village, Moon and Kim vaguely promised to work toward the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula, but made no references to verification or timetables.

North Korea for decades has been pushing a concept of “denuclearization” that bears no resemblance to the American definition. The North has been vowing to pursue nuclear development unless Washington removes its 28,500 troops from South Korea and the nuclear umbrella defending South Korea and Japan.

Some experts believe Kim may try to drag out the process or seek a deal in which he gives away his intercontinental ballistic missiles but retains some of his shorter-range arsenal in return for a reduced U.S. military presence in the South. This could satisfy Trump but undermine the alliance between Washington and Seoul.

Kim declared his nuclear force as complete in December, following North Korea’s most powerful nuclear test to date in September and three flight tests of ICBMs designed to reach the U.S. mainland.

North Korea announced at a ruling party meeting last month that it was suspending all tests of nuclear devices and ICBMs, as well as the plan to close the nuclear testing ground.

Kim said during the meeting that the nuclear test site’s mission had come “to an end” because the North had completed developing nuclear-capable intermediate-range missiles, ICBMs and other strike means.

The North also said for the first time at the meeting that it had been conducting “subcritical” nuclear tests. These refer to experiments involving a subcritical mass of nuclear materials that allow scientists to examine the performance and safety of weapons without triggering a nuclear chain reaction and explosion.

North Korea’s reference to such activity is designed to communicate that even without underground testing, the country intends to maintain its nuclear arsenal and be a “responsible” steward of those weapons at the same time, said Andrea Berger, a senior analyst at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Still, the closure of the underground testing site could be a useful precedent for Washington and Seoul as they proceed with the nuclear negotiations with Pyongyang, analysts say.

“Now that North Korea has accepted in principle that agreements should be verified, U.S. negotiators should hold them to this standard for any subsequent agreement,” said Adam Mount, a senior defense analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. “It will make it more difficult for Kim Jong Un to deny inspections now that he has placed them on the table.”

North Korea has invited the outside world to witness the dismantling of its nuclear facilities before. In June 2008, international broadcasters were allowed to show the demolishing of a cooling tower at the Nyongbyon reactor site, a year after the North reached an agreement with the U.S. and four other nations to disable its nuclear facilities in return for an aid package worth about $400 million.

But in September 2008, the North declared that it would resume reprocessing plutonium, complaining that Washington wasn’t fulfilling its promise to remove the country from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The administration of George W. Bush removed North Korea from the list in October 2008 after the country agreed to continue disabling its nuclear plant. However, a final attempt by Bush to complete an agreement to fully dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program collapsed that December when the North refused to accept U.S.-proposed verification methods.

The North went on to conduct its second nuclear test in May 2009.

Sasha Abramsky on the Decline of Empathy and the Future of Democracy (Audio and Transcript)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer speaks with Sasha Abramsky, a journalist, professor at UC Davis and author of several books, most recently “Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream.”

Scheer and Abramsky discuss how issues like immigration and income inequality have festered in the U.S. for decades, and helped lead to Donald Trump’s election as president.

Abramsky says, “And coming back to this notion of whether or not Trump supporters are ‘deplorables,’ clearly you can’t say all 60 million-plus people who voted for one candidate share all of the same set of values. It’s too simplistic. But I think it’s fair to say that anyone who voted for Donald Trump was, at the very best-case scenario, willing to turn a blind eye to a stupendous catalog of bigotries.”

Abramsky adds that the decline of empathy in our culture does not bode well for the future of democracy. He says, “We’re very bad at getting the deeper stories, the stories that explain context, the stories that take you out of your comfort zone, the stories that take you to other communities and that allow you to build a sense of empathy. And you know, one of the things that, frankly, horrifies me about this moment is that empathy seems to be an emotion that is in danger of decaying and corroding. And how a society functions when it lacks basic empathy, I have no idea.”

Listen to the interview in the player above and read the full transcript below. Find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to add the intelligence comes from my guests, otherwise it would be presumptuous. And my guest today is Sasha Abramsky, who has written a whole series, I think eight of them, really important books on poverty, on the prison population, on his own grandparents, who raised him in London. And he writes a lot for The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, the Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. But the reason I wanted to talk to him today, or we’re lucky to talk to him today, is he’s written a really provocative, and in the best sense of provocative, important book called “Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream.” It’s a study of irrational fear in the United States. And I stayed up really quite late last night, ‘cause I thought well, you know, I could get through this in a couple of days. But you know, I really stopped at different points, and then at four in the morning I had to see how it ends. Because I think it really begs a very important question. There’s a hook in the book, of course, describing the victory of Trump, and why are we at this moment in our history, which fascinates most people, even around the world. And is it because of jumping at shadows, the book’s title; is it the triumph of fear, and does it spell the end of the American dream. So in fact, let me, instead of giving my own view of it at first, why don’t you tell us what the basic thesis is.

Sasha Abramsky: I mean, the thesis is it grew out of work I was doing for a number of years. I was traveling around the country, I was talking to people about economic inequality, about poverty; I’d done a lot of work in the criminal justice system, and the fact that we were putting just vast numbers of people behind bars, oftentimes for relatively low-level offenses that in years and decades past would not have resulted in that kind of ending. And it really began to fascinate me as a theme running through modern American history, that in many ways we were being saturated with images of risk and of fear. Whether that risk and fear was around terrorism or around the violence of young criminals, or whether it was around the collapse of economic prospects or the home foreclosures that kicked in after 2007-08 and so on. And that as we were becoming more fearful, and it was a combination both of things that merited fear, but also of things that we grossly overestimated the risks associated with them. As we became more fearful, one of the things that was happening was our politics was devolving, and that we were increasingly, A, living in our own echo chambers where we were only hearing things that reaffirmed or magnified our fears; and B, that as a result of that we were becoming particularly vulnerable to demagogic messaging. That if politicians came forward, and it wasn’t even politicians of a given ideology, it was just the idea that if a politician came forward willing to exploit whatever fears of the moment were in the news, and willing to play on people’s divisions rather than looking for ways of bringing people together, that there was something in the current moment that was leaving America particularly vulnerable to that. And so I started reporting the book, and I started thinking about the themes in the book about a year or two before Donald Trump declared his candidacy. And then Trump comes along halfway through my reporting, and suddenly I sort of had in real time a petri dish where I could see exactly what was happening, exactly how this was playing out. So the second sort of theme within the book is, what happens on the ground when demagogic politics takes root. And that’s really the premise of “Jumping at Shadows.”

RS: The tension in the book, as I see it, is that these shadows were not created by Donald Trump, in the sense of things that are frightening to us. And you know, after all, your previous books about the prison population and poverty have a lot to do with the bipartisan failure to deal with poverty, to deal with opportunity. Your book has a very strong section on the growing income divide, to alarming proportions. These are real problems. And in the body of your book, you apportion responsibility to the mainstream–to the mainstream media, to mainstream politicians. After all, the incarceration was accelerated by Bill Clinton’s crime programs, tough on crime; poverty was accelerated by his attack on the welfare system called welfare reform; you could go down the list. Certainly moderate republicans like George W. Bush gave us the fear of Muslims and international terrorism in disproportionate terms. And what Trump did was basically come along and capitalize on this hysteria. Is that not the case?

SA: Yeah, I think to a large extent that is the case. One thing I’m very bad at in my journalism, because it doesn’t interest me very much, is personality-based reporting. So a book like “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff, I found it infinitely entertaining; I read it in about 12 hours straight. It was, you know, it was a really good soap opera read. But when I’m reporting, what interests me is the structures of ideas: how a culture changes over time, how things that were once considered taboo or outside the mainstream, over time morph into the norm. And so, you know, the question I wrestled with, is Trump cause or causation, cause or effect? Is he the cause of the bigotries that are coursing through our politics at the moment, or is his election the consequence of those bigotries? And the answer is both. Trump emerges after a series of long changes in our culture. He emerges at the back end of two decades of the War on Crime and the War on Terror, which normalized first mass incarceration and then normalized torture in the name of the state. He emerged at the back end of 40 years, from the early 1970s, of growing income inequality that plundered the future of tens of millions of Americans and made them feel, with good reason, that their children’s lives would be less stable and more precarious than were their parents’ lives. He emerged at the back end of a decade of the housing crisis, wherein millions of Americans lost their homes and lost the savings associated with their homes. So in all kinds of ways, Trump comes out of this historical process. Now, that doesn’t mean he’s not different from the politicians who came before him; he is. He’s deeply demagogic. He’s manipulative of the truth, or contemptuous of the truth, in a way that no other politician, at least since Nixon, has been. Even someone like Dick Cheney, who was a deeply dark politician, hasn’t played fast and loose with the truth in quite the way that Trump and his cohorts have. So I do think there is something qualitatively, standalone different about the Donald Trump presidency. But I think that if we’re going to understand where it came from, and the dangers that it represents to our moment–and also how we get beyond this moment and into a different, more humane, more decent political space again–we have to understand all of these big trends. And the premium that we now place on fear, the premium that we place on what I call in my book, “irrational fear.” And the way that that fear has become the coin of our political discourse, the currency of our political discourse.

RS: You know, in my own experience, like where I live in the, you know, building, I had very sensible people who–appearing sensible people–who voted for Trump. And the discontent, it seems to me, is deeper and more widespread about this, what has happened. And you mentioned the housing meltdown–I think it’s 13 million people lost their homes. You know, it’s real serious, the income inequality. So let me just put it right to you: whether Trump represents– and he clearly represents the ugliest face we’ve had in the presidency, in this sense; and there’s something good about that, at least he has a lot of critics. But really, isn’t this the product of a mainstream, establishment indifference to the lot of ordinary people, and caring a great deal about the super-wealthy?

SA: Yeah. When you were introducing me, you mentioned that I’d written eight books. And what I’ve done over the last–I’ve been writing since the early 1990s, so 25 years at this point. And the thing that runs as a common thread through all of my books is looking at the collapse of both the political consensus and also the collapse of the egalitarian premises of economic policymaking and tax policymaking in the postwar period. And what happens when you divest in cities, and what happens when you divest in job training, and underinvesting in education, and what happens when you cut taxes for the wealthy, and what happens when you cut social services for the poor. And that’s a common theme; it runs through my first books, which dealt with mass incarceration, and it runs through my middle section of books, which deal with poverty and hunger in America, and it runs into this most recent book about fear and the rise of demagogy. Now, part of the problem with writing a large number of books over a two-decade period is, you have to be very careful to avoid repeating yourself. And certainly in my earlier books, and in particular in “The American Way of Poverty,” I talk at great length about the fact that it was both political parties, as you say–both political parties that were ignoring ordinary people, and were ignoring the plight that was created by the stampede to a deregulated, globalized economy. So I’m by no means laying all the blame either at the republicans’ feet, or in the person of Donald Trump himself. I think this is a huge problem created over decades and bought into by both political parties. And coming back to this notion of whether or not Trump supporters are “deplorables,” clearly you can’t say all 60 million plus people who voted for one candidate share all of the same set of values. It’s too simplistic. But I think it’s fair to say that anyone who voted for Donald Trump was, at the very best-case scenario, willing to turn a blind eye to a stupendous catalog of bigotries. That if you were going to vote for Donald Trump–maybe because you were economically dislocated, maybe because you felt with good reason that both political parties didn’t care about your housing situation or didn’t care about your access to health care–if you were going to then turn around and use that embitterment, and that sense that society has failed you, to elect someone like Donald Trump, you could only do so if you were willing to ignore his anti-Muslim bias, if you were willing to ignore his anti-Mexican bias, if you were willing to ignore the fact that time and again he made anti-African American statements, if you were willing to ignore the fact that he was deeply hostile to the rights of the LGBT community. If you were going to vote for Donald Trump, you essentially had to say that all of those bigotries, and all of his personal crudity–the way he treated women for example–that all of that was somehow irrelevant. So, does that make the person who voted for Donald Trump a “deplorable”? No, in my mind that’s a uniquely unhelpful way to talk about what’s happening to our politics. But it does mean that the person at the top, the man who ended up being elected president, is a deplorable.

RS: I understand that, but frankly, that’s not the strength of your book. There are plenty of books around–and you don’t really even go in that much to what he’s done so far, or what he stands for. The thesis of the book, it seems to me, is torn between two ideas, and I just want to get at what it says, rather than who’s right or wrong. And one thesis, which is convenient to a lot of mainstream journalists and politicians and so forth, is that this is an abnormality. And somehow, something bad happened because he’s a particularly effective demagogue, and people lost their reason, and so forth, and inherent racism emerged. And that’s a convenient view; it lets everybody else off the hook. And in fact in your book, when you talk about Hitler–I mean, people, you know, the comparison, but you talk about the collapse of Germany, or the rise of fascism–you say there it’s not shadows, because there you really had big economic problems, and then a lot of people turned to fascism. But what really happened in Germany, and in world politics regarding Germany after the First World War, is that the system broke down for many people. And they chose, or went along, or didn’t sufficiently resist, you know, the obviously most dangerous, irrational person we’ve seen in modern history, because they were panicked, confused, desperate. And the only reason I’m stressing this, is so much about Trump is made about manners–his boorishness, his crudeness. But that would be the wrong way to view the danger of what I think is neofascism. And in Germany it wasn’t that Hitler’s manners were wrong; it was that the establishment went for that. Because they had failed in their own society, and there you had the best educated, most scientifically oriented society, and which in fact wasn’t particularly prejudicial towards Jews compared to other European nations, and so forth–lost its mind. And I know you resist the analogy with Germany in your own book–you say, they had real problems, we don’t have problems of that dimension–but there seems to be something very similar afoot here. That the establishment lost its way, did not attend to problems, whether they be immigration, housing, income, all the other things that you mentioned very effectively in your book. And as a result, this really dangerous figure, demagogue, emerges and has credibility.

SA: Yeah, I mean, I both resist and also don’t resist the analogy with Germany. I resist it to the extent that it seems to me there are some institutional braking mechanisms to both the Trump persona and the Trump policies that didn’t exist in the Germany of the early 1930s. On the other hand, in a lot of my writing, both in the book and also in articles I’ve done for Haaretz in Israel, for the New Statesman in the U.K., for The Nation and the Sacramento Bee here in the United States, I’ve also drawn out the analogies and the comparisons. And one of the things that fascinates me–well, a couple of things that fascinate me. One is the way that when a demagogic personality and his minions take power, it has tremendous trickle-down effects on the way the culture functions. And I do think the boorishness is a part of it–that the anti-intellectualism, the willingness to use violent language, the crudity, the attacks on the free press, the attacks on academia–all of this is part of a sort of fascist mindset package. But the other thing is, and you talked about this in your question, the buy-in that happens when you have business elites, and when you have industrial elites, and when you have policymaking elites who don’t necessarily like the leader, but tolerate him because they think he’s going to deliver economic benefits their way. And so you saw that very clearly in the rise of Hitler, that people like Von Papen, these traditional conservatives in Germany, loathed the personality of Hitler, but they tolerated him because they thought they could use him. And it turned out they were wrong; he was actually very good at using them, rather than the other way around. And you see this today, that business elites in the United States might not like the persona of Donald Trump, and people like Rex Tillerson or any of the others who bought into his administration in early 2017 might not have liked Trump as an individual, but they were willing to be sycophantic towards him because they thought they could control him, and they would get their tax cuts, and they would get their deregulation, and they would get their judicial nominations. And one of the things I’ve been writing about over the last several months is the Faustian bargain that that is: that yes, you can support Donald Trump to get your tax cuts, but it comes with a tremendous moral cost, a tremendous political cost, a tremendous cost in terms of America’s standing in the world, a tremendous cost in terms of the damage it does, both short-term and long-term, to the American culture. And so the longer this regime lasts–and I do think it’s a regime more than an administration–the longer this regime lasts, the more that the analogy with late Weimar or early Nazi Germany starts to make sense. Not necessarily because all the politics are identical, not necessarily because the raw violence is the same; it’s not. But because the cultural implosion of a sophisticated country going down a dark path, there’s the similarity.

RS: [omission for station break] A big theme in your book is how we treat immigrants and the “other,” foreigners. And I kept thinking, you know, you’re 46, I guess, and I’m 82. Well, I covered that border when Jimmy Carter–you went down to the border in Arizona, I guess, and Texas, I don’t know, in the book–you know, I covered that when Jimmy Carter was president and Leonel Castillo was the immigration director. And he had been the mayor of Houston, a thoroughly enlightened person. And they could not take any, or did not take any significant steps to make that border more rational, to increase the quota from Mexico and Central America, to really deal with the problem. So the compelling part of your book, where you describe people dying in the desert–you know, the harsh reality of what immigration–well, that’s the current system. Now, it’s true, Trump’s solution is going to only make it worse. But to raise the question of why we haven’t dealt with a sound immigration policy all of these years–bipartisan–actually, the republicans used to be better on this issue. They actually were in favor of a higher level of immigration and so forth, because they were needed for agriculture and what have you. Now, the fact of the matter is that yes, Trump comes along and benefits from this chaos, and–actually, not really, the problem is no worse, in fact in many ways better than it was, so it is a shadow issue in many ways. But the fact of the matter is, this is a problem that should have been solved half a century ago, and there was no interest. So we could take each one of the things in your book; you talk about torture, and you say, Trump has fetishized torture and he makes these terrible speeches. But who normalized torture? It was, first of all, George W. Bush and his government; people who are now respectable professors at universities; it was democrats who went along with an irrational war. We could go down the line on any one of these issues.

SA: Yeah, you can go further back, you can go to the 1960s and the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. And I talk about that in the book. You know, none of the things that I talk about in the book are meant to lead readers to the conclusion that all was good in the world and then suddenly, unexplainably, Donald Trump came along and all was bad in the world. That’s a completely inadequate analysis. Clearly there were these huge problems that were percolating and just coursing through the American body politic and the American economy and the American culture, and that had been growing more dangerous for decades, and had been festering for decades. And all of that was a precondition for the emergence of Trump. So nothing in my book is meant to posit the idea that Trump is aberrational. I think in some ways he’s the predictable end point of these things that, as you said, both political parties really failed to address or had no interest in putting the spotlight on, for decades. And some of those issues are economics, some of them are about immigration, some of them are about border control. And what we’re seeing now is it all come to a head in 2016-17-18. But I want to go back to something else. A large part of my book is not explicitly about politics. A large part of my book is what happens when we as a society miscalibrate the likelihood of bad things occurring. And that’s to do with how we get information; it’s to do with the way our media works; it’s to do with our entertainment industries; it’s to do with the echo chambers that are created at warp speed, and that we don’t yet fully understand in social media. And that leads to all kinds of weird results, and some of them are political, some of them are medical. So you see the anti-vaccination movement, which is misusing scientific studies to essentially create a very dangerous situation where large numbers of people aren’t immunizing their kids. It goes to how we educate our children, and the idea that we need to lock down our schools so that schools increasingly resemble militarized or prison environments, rather than education settings. It goes to what we regard as inherently dangerous, and a large part of that goes to what we pay attention to, not to actual real risk. So there’s a reason that more Americans, for example, think that spiders are dangerous than think that nuclear weapons are dangerous. When you calibrate these probabilities of risk, you have these studies showing that things like climate change and nuclear war are way down the American priority of risk. And things like spiders are way up the American priority of risk. Well, that doesn’t make any real sense, but it’s to do with how we process information. It’s to do with where we get our information from. It’s to do with who’s talking about things, rather than the inherent danger or the mass scale of the danger of something.

RS: The book is “Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream.” And the really sobering message of your book is that it takes a certain kind of human being to function in a democratic society, to have agency, to be the center of independent thought, to be a critical thinker. There’s an assumption in the American experiment that the average, white male at least, and then hopefully extended to larger groups, would be an independent agent making decisions, and that’s why their freedom had to be protected. And what your book is really suggesting is that we have something like people like Erich Fromm talked about when they did talk about fascism. You know, we have a process which is destroying independent thought, and substituting fear. I think that’s the big idea of this book. It’s the destruction of critical thought and the advancement of an intimidating, fearsome image of the surrounding that leads to paranoia.

SA: You know, I increasingly feel old and curmudgeonly, because I teach journalism classes at UC Davis, and I time and again sort of stress to my students the importance of worldly knowledge, of being informed about the world you’re a part of, and the current affairs that you’re a part of. Because otherwise you can’t make rational decisions. If you don’t know who your senator is, or you don’t know when the election is, or you don’t know where to get information about how the economy is functioning or not functioning, if you don’t know who international leaders are. That it becomes impossible to act and respond as a citizen. And you know, I think technology is neither good nor bad; I’m not one of those luddites who says, “All new technology is a bad thing and we should go back to writing with quills, or at the very most writing with a typewriter.” You know, I don’t believe that. I think computers have a role in society, I think social media has a role in society, I think cell phones have a role in society. But what I draw the line at is this notion that technology is inherently good. That the more technology we surround ourselves by, the quicker we get the news; that somehow magically, we’re all going to be really well informed. Well, that only depends on if you’re getting accurate news. But if you lose the ability to distinguish what isn’t true from what is true, if you lose the ability to distinguish when you’re being sold a bill of goods from when you’re not being sold a bill of goods–well, at the end of the day, you’ve become a subject, not a citizen. Because you’ve become somehow inherently passive. And I do think that there’s a grave danger, in the social media moment in particular, that we surround ourselves with sensationalist imagery which trends on social media, or trends on aggregator news sites. And we’re very good at getting these trending stories, and we have all this clickbait which gets us to these stories. And we’re very bad at getting the deeper stories, the stories that explain context, the stories that take you out of your comfort zone, the stories that take you to other communities and that allow you to build a sense of empathy. And you know, one of the things that, frankly, horrifies me about this moment is that empathy seems to be an emotion that is in danger of decaying and corroding. And how a society functions when it lacks basic empathy, I have no idea.

RS: We’re doing this from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism for KCRW. And our slogan this last year, on the journalism side, has been “empathy,” the word you just used, and on the communication side it’s been “critical thinking.” And yet, when I wander around, I wonder, do we really take these ideas seriously anywhere? And I think one of the important ideas in your book is that the human brain is quite fragile, and can be easily impacted, can be undermined. And you have all these MRI studies and everything; I mean, there’s a lot of really good science in this book that is worth reading, aside from all the things we’ve been talking about; you’re very good at summarizing all these studies. And really what it has to do with is, how do you preserve the integrity of the individual? Which is, after all, the assumption of a republic of free people. How do you preserve that integrity? And my argument, going back to the beginning of this, with your book, and I found it so interesting to be in continual struggle over your ideas, I think–forget about what you’re doing; I think a lot of the Trump-bashing is giving the establishment a pass. Because in fact, what you mean by an “establishment” is a group of people you count on to keep the population healthy, if only for their own interest, long-term. If you don’t have an educated populace, if you don’t take care of the interests of ordinary people, if you don’t keep them informed, you’re going to have an alienated, disoriented population. And when I look back at what’s happened during this trajectory that you describe in your book, the real damage was done by an establishment of well-spoken, well-educated people who were not boorish. But they didn’t care about the poor, they didn’t care about immigrants, they didn’t care about Muslims, they got us into one foreign adventure after another that involved using very ugly methods, they lied to us consistently. And when I look back on this trajectory that I lived through, even before you were born–I guess it was 1972 or something–a lot of damage had been done. A lot. A lot of lying, a lot of fear mongering about the Cold War and everything else. My fear is, they cannot be trusted to set it right. Say they get rid of Trump–so what? They’ll still keep lying, they’ll still defend torture, they’ll still invade countries without justification. Isn’t that the case?

SA: Yeah. I mean, I think there are two different issues here. One of them is that the rise of a national security state–which occurred pretty much without any pause from World War II onwards–the rise of a national security state poses huge challenges to democracy. Because, A, it vests world-destroying powers in a nuclear presidency, and B, it needs a vast security apparatus in order to function. So you have millions of people with top-secret security clearances, and hundreds of thousands of people who are spying on their neighbors, and so on and so forth. And it’s done using very advanced eavesdropping tools and computer tools and everything else; it’s not nearly as crude or as obvious as the Stasi techniques in East Germany, let’s say. But it doesn’t mean it’s not a part of how the country functions. So partly, you’re absolutely right that there is this sort of national security state that has been created over generations, which poses challenges to our autonomy as citizens. But the second thing, at a much lower level, is the way that information is processed and distributed. And one of the things I was fascinated by in some of my earlier books, when I was writing on the criminal justice system, is the role of local media. And this is decades before Trump entered the political scene. You had a local media frenzy based around the slogan, “If it bleeds, it leads.” So any crime story became the lead news. And people were saturated with images of violence and shootouts and drug sales and so on and so forth. And it helped reshape our approach to crime and punishment. And so throughout the 1980s, you had these images on TV, and then throughout the 1990s and 2000s, even though the crime rate was actually going down, and even though the murder rate in one city after another after another was actually going down, you wouldn’t have known it from local media. And so people were getting more and more scared about crime, and they were changing their personal behaviors in response; they were changing their political behaviors in response. And they were asking and getting from their state leaders vast investments in the criminal justice infrastructure, in the building of new prisons, in the hiring of new police officers, in the militarizing of police technology and so on. You’re absolutely right: it makes no sense to let the policy elites and the economic elites off the hook here, because we’re seeing on all these different levels, whether it’s the imposition of national security systems that have sort of accompanied the rise of the nuclear presidency, or whether it’s the way that we respond to things like crime and punishment, you’re seeing a breakdown of, A, the ability of citizens to make rational decisions, and B, you’re seeing a breakdown in the information generating systems that give them that ability.

RS: Depressing, but accurate, I fear. Ah, I’ve been talking to Sasha Abramsky, who is really, if you don’t know his work, he’s one of our most important, dare I say it, public intellectuals. Eight really, truly significant books. And I think his most important work, certainly for me the most provocative work, it really got me thinking and questioning: “Jumping at Shadows,” it’s a Nation book–“Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream.” So, thank you, Sasha.

SA: Oh, my pleasure.

RS: And our producers at KCRW are Rebecca Mooney and Joshua Scheer. Our engineers are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore here at the USC School for Communications and Journalism. And I can’t thank them enough for making the facilities available. We have the brilliant engineer Sebastian Grubaugh. Thanks again and see you next week.

 

 

Trump Team May Be Focusing on Odd, Obscure Iran Plan

President Donald Trump’s unilateral exit from the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) has triggered a frenzied push inside the administration to support color revolution-style regime change operations in Iran.

According to the neoconservative Free Beacon, National Security Director John Bolton has authorized the publication and distribution of an internal white paper urging “a strategy by which the Trump administration can actively work to assist an already aggravated Iranian public topple the hardline ruling regime through a democratization strategy that focuses on driving a deeper wedge between the Iranian people and the ruling regime.”

The white paper was produced by Jim Hanson, a self-proclaimed expert “practitioner of the art of war” who is virtually unknown in Washington. I know of Hanson primarily through his prolific presence on Twitter, where he operates under the handle, “Uncle Jimbo,” generally behaves like a far-right troll, and has eloquently branded me a “#JihaDbag.”

Says the apologist for Palestinian terrorism#JihaDbag https://t.co/F4ZXoriSGU

— Jim Hanson (@Uncle_Jimbo) April 8, 2016

Hanson is the director of the Security Studies Group (SSG), a little-known think tank staffed by former employees of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. Like Gaffney, who has spilled gallons of ink trying to prove that Barack Obama was a Muslim, Hanson and his colleagues are fervent anti-Islam zealots who emerged from the fever swamps of right-wing online media, touting their military experience and mock scholarship to market themselves as counter-terror experts.

During the 2016 campaign, Hanson and his crew insinuated themselves into the campaign of Ted Cruz before moving into Trump’s orbit thanks to sponsorship from Steve Bannon and his alt-national security council, the Strategic Initiatives Group. Bannon was eventually removed from the White House under pressure from the national security establishment, but the subsequent replacement of H.R. McMaster with Bolton at the NSC has brought Hanson and his SSG back into the fray. The resurgence of these counter-terror cranks suggests that Trump’s Iran policy is heading towards a dangerous and very strange place.

Troll Hammer of Thor https://t.co/lBI3zSz2pZ

— Jim Hanson (@Uncle_Jimbo) April 24, 2016

Back in April 2016, Sarah Lazare interviewed Hanson for the Grayzone Project. His comments are worth revisiting, not only because of the fanaticism he exhibited, but because of the  ignorance he displayed when discussing his supposed field of expertise. Here are a few lowlights:

● Hanson offered vigorous support for the religious profiling of suspects by police but wasn’t sure if race should be a factor as well. “Um, no. How about no. I’ll go with no. If I was going to start, that’s not one of the things I would put in the initial profile,” Hanson said when asked if race should be part of law enforcement’s profiling criteria.

● He introduced a vague plan to patrol Muslim-heavy neighborhoods but couldn’t name a single one. According to Hanson, Minneapolis and Boston are hotbeds of “jihadism” and deserve some form of mass surveillance.

● He thought 14-year-old “clock boy” Ahmed Mohamed had engaged in a calculated publicity stunt when he was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school. “Again, I don’t have any certainty on this, but the evidence points in that direction,” Hanson told Lazare.

● He insisted that I was, in fact, a “Jihadbag.” “That was the use of d-bag, a term of derision in conjunction with jihad since Max is a Palestinian terror apologist,” Hanson explained. “So it was a neologism combining the word jihad and d-bag for him personally.”

To counter allegations of Islamophobia, Hanson’s colleague at SSG, David Reaboi, has pointed to the “great relations” he enjoys with countries like the UAE. SSG’s website is filled with material that echoes the kind of messaging the UAE and Saudi have pumped out against Qatar since they attempted to place the country under an embargo last year.

In June 2017, Hanson headlined a rally outside the Qatari embassy calling on the country to submit to Saudi and UAE demands. He was reportedly joined by Nexus Services, an immigrant bond services company posing as a “church group.” While cashing in on heavily publicized prize giveaways and real estate hustles, the company has been sued for exploiting and defrauding jailed immigrants. Its presence at a rally against Qatar raises the question of whether some entity was paying people to pose as activists.

.@realDonaldTrump held a summit of Muslim leaders

Most, including #Saudis, are working together to stop terror funding

Why won’t @Qatar? pic.twitter.com/08czl8v0eI

— Jim Hanson (@Uncle_Jimbo) June 29, 2017

While it is unclear if Hanson’s SSG enjoys financial support from the UAE, some of its key allies have been openly embraced by Abu Dhabi.

Last October, Bannon keynoted a conference in Washington aimed at promoting hostility towards the favorite targets of the UAE: Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Qatar. While the event was hosted under the banner of the neoconservative Hudson Institute, I witnessed UAE Ambassador Yousef Otaiba in attendance. The conference was preceded by Bannon’s meeting with UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and was immediately followed by a $300,000 contract with SCL, the parent company of Bannon’s now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, which the UAE hired to wage an information war against Qatar.

The UAE has also embraced Daniel Pipes, one of the most noxious anti-Muslim ideologues in the US. Last November, Pipes took supporters on a “fact finding expedition” to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, marketing the kingdom as “a model of success in a region that badly needs one.” Pipes has also emerged as an enthusiastic promoter of Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, whose rise has galvanized the Saudi-UAE-Israeli axis against Iran.

With Bolton in the White House, these forces have converged to produce an Iran policy that is edging quickly from containment to rollback. And Hanson appears to be in the thick of the action, producing a regime change blueprint for Trump’s NSC with enough time to still play “Uncle Jimbo” on Twitter.

Hawaii Volcano Has Scientists Looking to Mainland’s West Coast

SPOKANE, Wash.—The eruption of a Hawaii volcano in the Pacific “Ring of Fire” has experts warily eyeing volcanic peaks on America’s West Coast that are also part of the geologically active region.

The West Coast is home to an 800-mile (1,300-kilometer) chain of 13 volcanoes, from Washington state’s Mount Baker to California’s Lassen Peak. They include Mount St. Helens, whose spectacular 1980 eruption in the Pacific Northwest killed dozens of people and sent volcanic ash across the country, and massive Mount Rainier, which towers above the Seattle metro area.

“There’s lots of anxiety out there,” said Liz Westby, geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington, in the shadow of Mount St. Helens. “They see destruction, and people get nervous.”

Kilauea, on Hawaii’s Big Island, is threatening to blow its top in coming days or weeks after sputtering lava for a week, forcing about 2,000 people to evacuate, destroying two dozen homes and threatening a geothermal plant. Experts fear the volcano could hurl ash and boulders the size of refrigerators miles into the air.

Here are some key things to know:

What Is the Ring of Fire?

Roughly 450 volcanoes make up this horseshoe-shaped belt with Kilauea situated in the middle. The belt follows the coasts of South America, North America, eastern Asia, Australia and New Zealand. It’s known for frequent volcanic and seismic activity caused by the colliding of crustal plates.

America’s most dangerous volcanoes are all part of the Ring of Fire, and most are on the West Coast, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Besides Kilauea, they include: Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier in Washington; Mount Hood and South Sister in Oregon; and Mount Shasta and Lassen Volcanic Center in California.

Images of lava flowing from the ground and homes going up in flames in Hawaii have stoked unease among residents elsewhere along the Ring of Fire. But experts say an eruption on one section of the arc doesn’t necessarily signal danger in other parts.

“These are isolated systems,” Westby said.

When Will the West Coast Volcanoes Erupt?

No eruption seems imminent, experts say.

The Cascades Volcano Observatory monitors volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest and posts weekly status reports. All currently register “normal.”

But the situation can change fast.

“All our mountains are considered active and, geologically speaking, things seem to happen in the Northwest about every 100 years,” said John Ufford, preparedness manager for the Washington Emergency Management Division. “It’s an inexact timeline.”

Some geologists believe Mount St. Helens is the most likely to erupt.

But six other Cascade volcanoes have been active in the past 300 years, including steam eruptions at Mount Rainier and Glacier Peak and a 1915 blast at Lassen Peak that destroyed nearby ranches.

What Kind of Damage Could They Do?

The Big Island scenes of rivers of lava snaking through neighborhoods and sprouting fountains are unlikely in the Pacific Northwest.

“Lava is not the hazard, per se, like in Hawaii,” said Ian Lange, a retired University of Montana geology professor. Cascade volcanos produce a thicker, more viscous type of lava than Hawaiian volcanoes, so it doesn’t run as far, Lange said.

The Cascade volcanoes can produce huge clouds of choking ash and send deadly mudslides into rivers and streams. Two of the most potentially destructive are Mount St. Helens, north of the Portland, Oregon, metro area, and 14,000-foot (4,270-meter) Mount Rainier, which is visible from the cities of Seattle and Tacoma.

Mount Rainier eruptions in the distant past have caused destruction as far west as Puget Sound, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) away.

The volcano hasn’t produced a significant eruption in the past 500 years. But it remains dangerous because of its great height, frequent earthquakes, active hydrothermal system, and 26 glaciers, experts said.

An eruption on Mount Rainier could rapidly melt glaciers, triggering huge mudflows — called lahars — that could reach the densely populated surrounding lowlands, Westby said.

Another major danger from a Cascade volcano eruption would be large amounts of ash thrown into the air, where it could foul aircraft engines.

What Are Communities Doing to Prepare?

The closest settlement to a West Coast volcano may be Government Camp, on Oregon’s Mount Hood. Lava could conceivably reach the town, but the greater threat is an eruption triggering a so-called pyroclastic flow, which is a fast-moving cloud of hot ash and gas, experts said.

But Lange believes California’s Mount Shasta is the most dangerous, in part because it is surrounded by towns.

The town of Mt. Shasta has numerous response plans for emergencies, including a volcano eruption, Police Chief Parish Cross said. But the plan for a volcano is pretty fluid, he said.

“We don’t know the size or scope of the event,” Cross said, including which direction the eruption would occur.

This is not an issue in Orting, Washington, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west of Mount Rainier. Orting would be directly in the path of a lahar, and local officials each year conduct drills in which children move from school to higher ground to escape the flow.

Students usually take about 45 minutes to walk the 2 miles (3 kilometers) to higher ground, which should be fast enough to escape, officials said.

“Our concern is ice and snow melting rapidly on Mount Rainier,” said Chuck Morrison, a resident of the town of 7,600 who has long been involved in evacuation planning. “We need a quick way off the valley floor.”

Orting is the town most vulnerable to lahar damage from Mount Rainier, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Scientists say that in the worst case, a 30-foot-high (9-meter-high) lahar with the consistency of wet concrete could rumble through Orting at 50 mph (80 kph) if volcanic activity suddenly melted snow and ice on Rainier.

42 Die in Week’s Israeli Strikes in Syria, Monitor Says

BEIRUT—A wave of Israeli strikes on suspected military positions in Syria this week killed 42 people, including at least 19 Iranians, a Syria war monitor reported Saturday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the death toll from attacks early Thursday has risen from 23 to 27, including at least 11 Iranians and six Syrian soldiers, including three officers.

In total, 42 people, including 19 Iranians, were killed over two days of strikes — from Tuesday to Thursday — according to the Observatory.

Israel’s defense minister called on Syria’s President Bashar Assad on Friday to clear his country of Iranian forces based there — warning that their presence will only bring more trouble to the already war-ravaged country.

Avigdor Lieberman’s comments were followed by threats from an Iranian cleric that Tel Aviv or Haifa would be in danger if Israel did “anything foolish.”

Israel had said its strikes on Thursday were in response to a barrage of Iranian rockets on its positions in the occupied Golan Heights, the most serious military confrontation between the two bitter enemies to date. It said it hit targets near the capital, in southern and central Syria, targeting weapons storage, logistics sites and intelligence centers used by elite Iranian forces in Syria. It also said it destroyed several Syrian air-defense systems after coming under heavy fire and that none of its warplanes were hit.

Syrian state-run media had said that Israel struck a military outpost near the capital Damascus late Tuesday, adding that its air defenses intercepted and destroyed two of the incoming missiles. The Observatory said at least 15 were killed in the strike, eight of them Iranians, including a member of the Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.

Israel had previously warned that Iran has been deploying its allied militias in the area.

Iran says Israel’s repeated attacks are based on “fabricated” reasons.

Separately, the Syrian state-run al-Ikhariya TV and the Observatory said airstrikes Saturday hit civilians in an Islamic State-controlled village in the northern Hassakeh province. The Observatory said eight members of the same family, including three children and five women, were killed.

Al-Ikhbariya put the death toll from the strikes at nine, including four children. State-run TV said they were carried out by the U.S-led coalition, which is operating in the area against IS.

An airstrike in the same area earlier this month killed at least 23 civilians. The coalition at the time said it was not aware of airstrikes by its warplanes in the area.

Iran Nuclear Deal and U.S. Pullout Reflect Epic Bipartisan Failures

Editor’s note: Scott Ritter was a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.  

President Trump made it official Tuesday, announcing that he would be withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action, or JCPOA. “The agreement,” he said in his speech, “was so poorly negotiated that even if Iran fully complies, the regime can still be on the verge of a nuclear breakout in just a short period of time. The deal’s sunset provisions are totally unacceptable. If I allowed this deal to stand, there would soon be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.”

The sunset provisions of the JCPOA are among the least understood aspects of that agreement. Prior to signing the JCPOA, Iran operated more than 20,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium to use in its indigenous nuclear program. The level of enrichment attained—3.7 percent for nuclear power reactors and under 20 percent for use in a medical research reactor—was well below that needed for use in a nuclear weapon. However, the international community, led by the United States, was concerned that Iran would be able to use its large number of centrifuges to rapidly increase the level of enrichment of its uranium stockpile to more than 90 percent, allowing Iran to have the fissile material needed for a nuclear bomb (or bombs) in a very short time.

In the lexicon of the nonproliferation specialists monitoring Iran, a new term was coined—“breakout time.” This was the amount of time required for Iran, once inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who were monitoring its nuclear enrichment efforts were removed, to produce enough 90 percent-enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. Using the 20,000 centrifuges it possessed, Iran’s breakout time was estimated to be around three months if using natural uranium feedstock, or around four weeks if using uranium feedstock already enriched to 3.7 percent.

The collective wisdom in the arms control community was that Iran needed to be kept to a breakout time of no less than one year. Under the JCPOA, this would be done by limiting the number of centrifuges it could operate to just over 5,000, while limiting the amount of 3.7 percent-enriched uranium it could have stored at any given time to no more than 300 kilograms. With these restrictions in place, Iran would have a breakout time of more than one year.

But for Iran, agreeing to such limitations in perpetuity made little sense. One of the considerations given to JCPOA calculus was that Iran eventually would seek to build an indigenous nuclear energy production capability, and it would require modern centrifuges capable of generating quantities of enriched uranium far in excess of 300 kilograms. Indeed, one of the key aspects of the JCPOA is Iran’s “long-term enrichment and enrichment research and development plan,” which details how Iran will proceed during the life of the JCPOA to prepare for the eventual implementation of a large-scale uranium enrichment program that would far exceed the parameters of the 12-month breakout scenario set forth in the main body of the JCPOA.

The so-called sunset clause of the JCPOA holds that after 15 years—meaning by 2030—all restrictions on the number of centrifuges Iran is allowed to operate, as well as the amount of enriched uranium it is permitted to store, will be lifted. In addition to increasing the numbers of centrifuges Iran can operate, it also will be able to start using more efficient, modern centrifuges.

For Iran, this clears the way to replace the inefficient centrifuges it can possess and operate under the JCPOA with as many highly efficient modern centrifuges it deems necessary to meet its legitimate needs for nuclear energy. The JCPOA allows for Iran to begin phasing out its older centrifuges with more capable models between years 11 and 13 of the agreement. Given the improved performance characteristics of these newer centrifuges, the one-year breakout time would be reduced to around four months sometime between years 11 and 13 of the JCPOA, or as early as 2026. It is this inevitable demise of the 12-month breakout window that prompted Trump to walk away from the JCPOA on the grounds that it no longer served U.S. national security interests.

Trump, however, was not the author of the JCPOA. That “honor” fell to President Barack Obama. On the issue of Iran, Obama proved as disingenuous as his predecessor, George W. Bush, when it came to fact-based policy on Iraq. A 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program concluded that Iran had not conducted any work on a nuclear weapon since 2003, and that intelligence provided to the IAEA by Israel in 2004 (which purported to prove the existence of a covert Iranian nuclear program) turned out to be of questionable provenance. The Obama administration, however, encouraged the IAEA in 2011 to release a report based upon the same discredited 2004 Israeli documents. The sole purpose of this report was to build consensus within the United States and around the world for the passage of stringent economic sanctions against Iran designed to pressure Tehran into giving up its nuclear program.

While Obama was able to use the 2011 IAEA report to push through Congress new unilateral American sanctions targeting Iranian oil sales in early 2012 (these sanctions were then used to pressure other countries to halt their purchase of Iranian oil through so-called secondary sanctions, which punished anyone operating in violation of U.S. law), it failed in forcing Iran to the negotiating table.

With everything the U.S. and its allies threw at Iran, including having Iranian citizens pay a huge economic cost in terms of a devastated economy and reduced quality of life, the pressure campaign still failed. The U.S.-led economic sanctions, rather than forcing Iran to abandon its nuclear program, empowered it to expand it efforts dramatically. The consequence was a dangerous situation. The U.S., after falsely building a narrative of Iran aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapon, now needed to either militarily confront Iran (and its expanding enrichment capacity) or find a diplomatic way out of a self-inflicted wound without losing political face at home and abroad.

The JCPOA was the result—a deal that recognized Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes (something the U.S. opposed for decades) while backing away from the fiction that it was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The IAEA, the U.S. and every nation that embraced the falsified intelligence used to underpin the allegations of an Iranian nuclear weapons program—so-called possible military dimensions, or PMD—could not acknowledge that what they sold to the world was founded on lies, so they constructed an inelegant solution. The IAEA, after consulting with Iran, prepared a report that “resolved” the PMD problem once and for all, and thus paved the way for the lifting of economic sanctions.

Yes, Iran agreed to an unprecedented level of intrusive inspections and restrictions on its enrichment program. But the JCPOA’s bottom line is that Iran retained thousands of active centrifuges in full operation. This represented a major political victory for Iran, given the years-long, concerted, U.S.-led effort to deny it access to even a single spinning centrifuge. No matter how hard the Obama administration tried to sell the JCPOA as a victory for American diplomacy and international peace and security, Iran brought the U.S. to the negotiating table, emerging with a nuclear program the world had tried to prevent it from obtaining while giving up a fictional nuclear weapons program it neither possessed nor desired.

The JCPOA was made to resolve a difficult and dangerous situation the U.S. created for itself. As a result, the Obama administration had to craft an agreement built on a foundation of lies. These lies proved to be its undoing. If Iran, as the U.S. claimed in pushing for economic sanctions, possessed a nuclear weapons program, and no effort was made to ensure that it acknowledged and dismantled that program, then any agreement delaying Iran access to the ability to produce enough highly enriched uranium for use in a nuclear weapon kicked Iran’s inevitable acquisition of a nuclear bomb down the road.

This is the heart of Trump’s argument against the JCPOA: that the so-called sunset clauses limiting the number and quality of Iranian centrifuges only delay, rather than prevent, an Iranian nuclear weapons program from reaching fruition. To alter Trump’s logic, the U.S. would need to discredit the intelligence it used to justify the economic sanctions it suspended when signing the JCPOA—the same sanctions the U.S. threatened to “snap back” in place if Iran was found to be in violation, and that Trump reinstated when he pulled out of the agreement.

The U.S. failed to do this, and the onus for this failure rests solely with the Obama administration. To save political face by not having to acknowledge that the heart of its Iran policy was built on a foundation of lies, the Obama administration embedded this lie into the heart of the JCPOA in the form of the agreement to resolve the “possible military dimension” issue based upon a wink and a nod, as opposed to verifiable inspections. While this was done as a political expedient designed to breathe life into the JCPOA, it turned out to be a poison pill that killed the agreement. One need only witness the briefing by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he cites a newly acquired archive of Iranian documents detailing an alleged nuclear weapons program, and the extent to which Trump relied on that presentation to underpin his decision to leave the JCPOA.

Trump will go down in history as the man who walked away from an agreement that all parties—including the U.S.—acknowledge that Iran was fully compliant with. Trump only deludes himself and those who support him by saying that his actions to confront a threat from Iran now, rather than waiting for it to manifest itself, will make America more secure. Iran’s nuclear program poses no threat to either America or the world, because it is, and always has been, a peaceful civilian program, something those in power know to be the case.

Trump was able to exploit the lies the Obama administration perpetrated in justifying his decision to walk away from the JCPOA. That fact is a sad reflection of the level of ignorance and antipathy that exists among U.S. citizens and those they elect to represent them in Congress.

Congress is, and has been, a witting facilitator of these lies. This should come as no surprise, however, because those the American people elect are a reflection of those they represent. Since 1979, when an Iranian mob took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for more than 400 days, the American people have been programmed to accept all information that paints Iran and its theocratic government in a negative light. When President Obama said Iran had a nuclear weapons program, the American people—even after the previous administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—did not demand hard evidence to back up the accusation.

Democrats will blame Trump for walking away from the JCPOA, and Republicans will blame Obama for making such a bad deal. But Congress, empowered by an ignorant American public willing to swallow at face value any news that paints Iran in a bad light, has made all of this possible. A lack of meaningful oversight of the intelligence community has allowed the lies about Iranian nuclear capability to be promulgated. Those lies were then used to impose economic sanctions intended to compel Iran to abandon a program it was not pursuing.

When examined from this perspective, Trump’s actions are a logical extension of the collective will of the American people, expressed over time through the actions of Congress. True, Obama gave us the nuclear agreement with Iran, despite its political unpopularity with Congress as a whole. Like all policies built on a foundation of lies, though, the JCPOA was doomed from its inception. Eventually, the incompatible notion of a fictional Iranian nuclear weapons ambition sold by Obama to Congress would collide with the reality of a renewed Iranian enrichment capacity once the sunset clauses of the JCPOA expired.

We can point the finger at Trump all we want, but at the end of the day, the American people—Republicans, Democrats, Independents and all others—share collective responsibility for his decision to walk away from the Iranian nuclear agreement. It conforms to a set of facts most Americans embraced, unquestioning, in endorsing a policy of economic containment that backfired.

Trump’s actions in walking away from the JCPOA didn’t shred American credibility. That happened a long time ago, before Donald J. Trump was even a glimmer in the eye of those who elected him.