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American History for Truthdiggers: Were the Colonists Patriots or Insurgents?

Truthdig editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “Make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the fourth installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His wartime experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 4 of “American History for Truthdiggers.” / See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

“Who shall write the history of the American Revolution?” John Adams once asked. “Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?”

“Nobody,” Thomas Jefferson replied. “The life and soul of history must forever remain unknown.”

* * *

Compare the tarring-and-feathering scene at the top of this article with the 1770 painting “The Death of General Wolfe” (immediately below this paragraph), which was featured in installment three of this Truthdig series. Painted by colonist Benjamin West, it shows North American colonists among those devotedly and tenderly attending the mortally wounded British general, who lies in a Christ-like pose. How did (at least some) North American colonists evolve from a proud celebration of empire into the riotous, rebellious mob portrayed in the illustration above? It’s an important question, actually, and it deals with an issue hardly mentioned in standard textbooks. Even rebellious “patriots” saw themselves as Englishmen right up until July 4, 1776. Others remained loyal British subjects through the entire Revolutionary War.

“The Death of General Wolfe” (1770) by Benjamin West. See part three of this Truthdig series for details of the scene and an examination of the political importance of the painting.

Most of the lay public tends to view the coming of the American Revolution as natural, predetermined, inevitable even. After all, “we” are the descendants of patriots with a special, anti-monarchical destiny. The British crown, with its intolerable taxation, merely stood in the way of American providence and thus was of course shunted aside in a glorious democratic rebellion. At least that’s the myth—the comforting preferred narrative.

The reality of the pre-revolt era was far more complex, influenced by diverse forces, motives, individual agency and contingency. The truth, as often the case, is messy and discomforting. Still, simplicity sells. Want to earn a bundle in royalties? Well, then avoid publishing an intricate analysis of lower-class colonial motivations. No one reads that stuff! It’s easy—just write another flattering biography of a “Founding Father.”

But just who were these “patriots”? What motivated them to seek open conflict with a powerful empire? How pure were their motives? Did they even represent a majority of colonists? And what of their tactics—did the ends justify the means? Only a fresh, comprehensive examination of this untidy, chaotic era promises satisfactory answers to these questions, the questions at the root of the United States’ very origins. Still, rest assured: The lead-up to the American Revolution has been, and will always be, a contested history. Perhaps Jefferson was right after all, and the soul of this history must remain unknown.

A Reassuring Tale: Common Explanations for the American Revolution

Taxes. Americans hate them with a unique national passion. After all, ours is a nation founded in opposition to insufferable, imperial taxation. Wasn’t it? One group certainly thought, and thinks, so. If you see the American Revolution as only a relic of the past, please note that in 2009, soon after the election of Barack Obama, a new conservative political movement arose and brought its version of history to the public square. The “tea party” was suddenly everywhere. Its supporters, mostly Republicans, even liked to dress up as colonists, adorning themselves with tricorner hats and carrying signs with anti-tax slogans. For these Americans, the past was immediate and President Obama was the new King George. However, as historian Jill Lepore has written,  the Tea Party Revolution was more about nostalgia than serious scholarship. In the tea party’s telling—which coheres with the popular understanding—the revolution was surely all about taxes.

Monarchy. This is equally anathema to the citizenry and inextricably tied to authoritarian taxation. Surely, our revolution was also a Manichean battle between tyranny and democracy, between royalty and republicanism. Despite generations of critical scholarship, some version of these basic, twin explanations pervades Americans’ collective memory of revolution and independence.

We all know the basic economic and political chronology of the rebellion. It’s usually told in a nice, neat sequence: Stamp Act, Boston Massacre, Tea Act, Boston Tea Party, Intolerable Acts, Lexington and Concord. New tax, colonial protest, British suppression, next tax, etc. This is an altogether linear, cyclical narrative, and it emphasizes the anti-tax and anti-monarchical components of colonial motivation. We hardly consider the British side, and it appears self-evident that all colonists were patriots. Who wouldn’t be? The Brits were “intolerable.”

It’s not that taxation didn’t factor at all in rebel motivations—it most certainly did. Still, there are some awkward questions worth raising; like, if taxes directly caused the war then how do we explain that just about every new tax was repealed before 1775? Besides, the colonists paid far lower taxes than metropolitan Britons. In fact, the Sugar Act of 1764 actually lowered the tax on molasses—it simply sought to more stringently enforce it. The Tea Act didn’t upset colonists so much for the economic cost as for the mandated monopoly it granted the British East India Co.

Surely, other, political and cultural factors must have contributed to a rebellion that men were willing to die for. An honest analysis of the coming of revolution must grapple with the varied, complex motives of individual “patriots.” Indeed, the rebellion was as much social revolution as political quarrel.

What Makes a “Patriot”?

There’s just one problem: Probably no more than one-third of all colonists were actually anti-imperial “patriots.” Our Founding Fathers and their followers weren’t even in the majority. That’s not so democratic! Furthermore, the motivations of the patriots were multifaceted, diverse and—largely—regional.

If only one in three colonists became dyed-in-the-wool patriots, then what of the others, the silent majority, so to speak? Well, most historians estimate that another third were outright pro-empire loyalists. The rest mostly rode the fence, too engaged in daily survival to care much for politics; those in this group waited things out to see which side emerged on top.

That story, that reality, is—for most Americans—rather unsatisfying. Maybe that’s why it never caught on and is hardly taught outside of academia.

As discussed, this was much more than just a quarrel between Americans and Britons; it was an intense debate over what British identity meant for those residing outside the home islands. The slogan “No taxation without representation!” has caught on as a prime explanation for rebellion, but even that reality was far more complex. It wasn’t just colonists who were taxed and had no proper voice in Parliament, but also many urban Britons within the United Kingdom. Tiny, rural aristocratic districts—so-called “rotten boroughs”—could count on a seat in the assembly while densely populated towns like Sheffield and Leeds went without representation. Metropolitan Englishmen no doubt had rights that were denied to their colonial cousins, i.e. a free internal trade market and the right to do business with foreign countries. However, colonists had benefits unknown in Great Britain, such as lower property taxes. In addition, there was slavery, from which some colonists profited handsomely at the suffering of fellow humans.

The varied class-based and regional motivations for patriot or loyalist association could be seen in New York’s Dutchess County, to consider only one example. In many cases, the primary motivation was the desire of middling tenant farmers to oppose their oppressive landlords. Thus, the battle lines of tenant riots in the 1760s became the dividing lines between patriot and loyalist a decade later. In Dutchess County’s south, the landlords were loyalists and, consequently, the tenants became avid patriots. Conversely, just a few miles north at Livingston Manor, the landlord was a member of the Continental Congress. Unsurprisingly, his tenants bore arms for the British.

Why We Fight—the Complex Motives of Colonial Rebels

Ideology or economics? This question about the primary cause of the American Revolution has raged among scholars for the better part of a century. There is persuasive evidence on both sides. Still, the strict binary is itself misleading. Patriot sentiment emerged for countless individual and communal reasons. Some colonists were avid readers of John Locke or British commonwealth-men like Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard. For them, it was all about ideology and independence—life, liberty and property. They were also obsessed with alleged conspiracy and corruption at the top ranks of Parliament and the monarchy.

Another group, especially in the Northern urban centers, abhorred what they saw as unfair taxation or imperial mercantilism that suppressed both free trade and a lucrative smuggling economy. Indeed, no less a figure than John Hancock himself was a famous smuggler! Still others, mainly in the Chesapeake region, desired more land and westward expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains into “Indian Country.” This had, after Pontiac’s Rebellion, become illegal due to the British Proclamation of 1763 that granted these lands to various native tribes.

Nor can we underestimate the class component of protest and rebellion. Merchants, artisans and laborers in Northern cities, such as Boston, tended to identify with the protest movement. These working and middle-class urbanites were egged on by firebrands like Samuel Adams—the failed tax collector and sometime brewer of beer. Adams founded a newspaper, the Independent Advertiser, which overtly pitched to the laboring classes the notion that “Liberty can never subsist without equality.” In the South, conversely, the landed gentry tended to be patriots, and it was the smallholders who were often loyalist. Still, any description of patriot motivations can hardly ignore class and the impulses of the uncouth urbanites, those whom historians have labeled “the people out of doors.”

* * *

Standard interpretations of the American revolutionary movement generally make no mention of religion. This is strange considering the profound religiosity of 18th-century colonists. While prominent Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were deists or agnostics, the vast majority of the population was devoutly Christian. Part of what accounts for the dearth of religious analysis among historians is no doubt the secular bias within the academic community. Still, religious fervor in the wake of the mid-18th-century Great Awakening certainly had influence over the rebellion. In comparing the religious proclivities of metropolitan Britons and English colonists in North America, one distinct difference stood out. While most Britons in the United Kingdom were members of the state’s Anglican Church, the preponderance of colonists were Protestant dissenters—Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers and Congregationalists—who had broken with the Church of England. One would be right to expect this inverse religious situation to influence colonial protests in the 1760s and 1770s.

New Jersey stands out as a representative example, at least among the Northern and Mid-Atlantic colonies. Most yeoman farmers were highly influenced by the Great Awakening’s revivalist teachings and became Protestant dissenters. The landed gentlemen, on the other hand, stayed loyal to the hierarchical Anglican Church. The messages of revivalist preachers were distinctly anti-authoritarian and anti-materialist, resonating among the smallholders who felt threatened by landed proprietors. When imperial taxes increased and British officials sought to assert increased control, the battle lines, unsurprisingly, cohered with religious preferences.

Colonists were fiercely chauvinistic Protestants with an intense hatred of Catholics. Thus, when Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774, allowing religious freedom to French-Canadian habitants, many colonists threw a fit! The crown, they assumed, must be beholden to a papist, Catholic conspiracy. Such religious tolerance was unacceptable and convinced many patriots that perhaps independence was the preferred path. The old spirit of intolerable Puritan zealotry was alive and well.

* * *

Some colonists simply resented military occupation. The British decision to send uniformed regular army troops to rebellious hotbeds like Boston had an effect opposite to what was intended. This is an old story. American soldiers in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have learned this lesson again and again as foreign military presence angered the locals and united disparate political, ethnic and sectarian groups in a nationalist insurgency. Nor were British troops—generally drawn from the dregs of English society—held in high esteem by the colonists. Most Bostonians were appalled by the uncouth manners of soldiers they described as rapists, papists, infidels or, worst of all, “Irish!”

The presence of thousands of soldiers also worsened a pervasive economic depression. Back then, off-duty soldiers and sailors were allowed to seek side work in the local economy to supplement their meager wages. They thus flooded Boston’s job market. Protests against the occupation sometimes got out of control when soldiers, thousands of miles from home in a strange land, made mistakes or overreacted. In one incident—sound familiar?—an 11-year-old Boston boy was shot dead by a trigger-happy trooper. A local journal wrote of the British occupation, “The town is now a perfect garrison.” It was not meant as a compliment.

“Boston Massacre, 1770” (1871), by Constantino Brumidi, on display in the U.S. Capitol.

However, no incident so inflamed the local consciousness—and our own historical memory—as the so-called Boston Massacre of 1770. In popular remembrance, and countless paintings, the event is depicted as a veritable slaughter perpetrated by heartless redcoats against peaceful patriot protesters. But hold on a moment. Was this really an accurate label? Do five dead men a massacre make? And what prompted the “slaughter”?

What started as snowball and rock throwing at British sentries quickly escalated into a raucous crowd shouting insults, a crowd armed with clubs and, in the case of one man, a Scottish broadsword. Some protesters grabbed at the lapels of a British officer’s uniform, several other rebels screamed “Fire, damn you!” no doubt confusing the enlisted soldiers. Finally, Benjamin Burdick, he with the broadsword, swung the weapon with all his might down upon a grenadier’s musket, knocking him to the floor. The soldier climbed to his feet and fired his musket at the crowd. Several fellow troopers did the same. The rest is history.

The soldiers and their officer were put on trial, certainly a strange allowance from a supposedly tyrannical regime. None other than a local lawyer, John Adams, defended the British troops and, taking mitigation into account, won their freedom. Adams took the case at great risk to his reputation, but he believed in equal justice for all, even redcoats. This narrative, no doubt, complicates the entire episode, and well it should. The revolutionary fairy tale to which we’ve grown accustomed is in distinct need of some nuance.

No one explanation exists for patriot motivations. Individual preferences, incentives and decisions are difficult to unpack. These were diverse peoples divided among themselves by class, religion and region. How, then, could one synthesize their countless motives? The historian Gary Nash offers an apt summary. The coming of the revolution was a “messy, ambiguous, and complicated” story of a “seismic eruption from the hands of an internally divided people … a civil war at home as well as a military struggle for national liberation.”

Revolutionary Tactics: Venerable Protest or Mob Rule?

A threatening letter left at loyalist homes in New York City (1765). It reads, “Pro Patria [For one’s country], The first man that either distributes or makes use of stampt paper, let him take care of his house, person & effects,” and it is signed “Vox Populi [“voice of the people”]; We dare.”

A Taliban “night letter” propaganda leaflet left on doors of villagers in Afghanistan (2010). It says: “Attention to all dear brothers: If the infidels come to your villages or to your mosques, please stop your youngsters from working for them and don’t let them walk with the infidels. If anybody in your family is killed by a mine or anything else then you will be the one responsible, not us.”

When I patrolled the mud villages of southwestern Kandahar province in Afghanistan, we sought to “protect” the population from the local Taliban insurgents. It was a difficult task. When our soldiers retired back to base camp, Taliban fighters owned the night and infiltrated the rural hamlets. A popular Islamist tactic was to leave threatening notes on the doors of suspected Afghan collaborators who dared so much as speak to the American invaders. We labeled them “night letters,” just another terror tactic, and reported their prevalence to our higher command. Few of my troopers, of course, knew that colonial patriots left the same sorts of threatening notes on the doors of alleged loyalists in Boston or Philadelphia. Is there really any difference?

Coercion has always been central to revolutions. Like it or not, the American variety was no exception. The patriot minority used threats and violence to enforce their narrative and their politics on the loyal and the apathetic alike. There was little democratic about it. Discomforting as it may be, the patriot movement was hardly a Gandhi-like campaign of peaceful civil disobedience. Patriots were passionate, they were relentless, and they were armed. Firearms were ubiquitous in the colonies, more so, even, than in Britain. Guns are as American as apple pie. So is street violence.

This was a barbaric world. Colonists slaughtered natives, beat slaves and publicly executed criminals, often leaving their bodies to rot in the town square. Alcohol abuse was endemic, and drinking men regularly settled tavern disputes with fists and knives. The patriot crowds abused tax collectors, loyalists and their social betters across the urban North. Tar and feathering, a favored and famous tactic, was far from the playful embarrassment of our imaginations. Rather, the act of putting molten tar onto human skin left many an unlucky loyalist in unimaginable pain and physically scarred. Many of the government bureaucrats so tortured were simply doing their jobs and sought only to make a living for their families. This was terrorism.

Arson and looting were often rampant as the mobs took on a life of their own. In 1765, a patriot crowd tore down the home of loyalist politician Thomas Hutchinson. In New York City, another rabble pillaged carriage houses and theaters. The motive: opposition to a relatively modest tax increase. In our collective memory, of course, such rebels are heroes. This is strange, as modern-day racial protests—Ferguson or Baltimore—are regularly pilloried as riotous criminal actions. Our patriot forebears were morally ambiguous, complex figures. Their tactics straddled the line between resistance and riot. The same could be said of the Los Angeles riots of 1992 or other urban racial outbursts. Of course, the irony is lost on us.

The Other Americans: Rebellion Through the Eyes of Loyalists, Indians and Blacks

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

—Samuel Johnson, English writer (1775)

Further tarnishing the heroic narrative of patriot ascendancy is one inconvenient fact: Most slaves preferred British to colonial rule, and most slave-holding planters were themselves patriots, especially in the South. As was the case in early colonial Virginia, American slavery and American freedom grew side by side in the late 18th century, a contradiction at the very heart of the colonial and early republican experience. This pattern endured as colonial “patriots” moved from resistance to rebellion against imperial authorities. Many modern apologists for our slave-owning founders insist that these men were merely a reflection of their time and place; a time, we are to suppose, when everyone supported slavery. Thus, we cannot critique the motives or point out the inconsistency in our esteemed forebears. Yet an honest look at the revolutionary era complicates the apologist narrative.

Indeed, the ostensibly tyrannical British practiced very little chattel slavery within the United Kingdom itself. In fact, in the Somerset v. Steuart case of 1772, England’s highest common law court ruled that chattel slavery was illegal. This judgment spooked many Southern colonial gentlemen, who began to fear the British metropolitan authorities were “unreliable defenders of slavery,” and this convinced many to join the patriot cause.

The slaves also asserted themselves and contributed to the fears of white planters. Although slave revolts were extraordinarily rare, the very threat of uprising terrified gentlemen in the Chesapeake and Deep South. In one sense the fear was justified. In South Carolina, for example, slaves constituted 60 percent of the colony’s population. During the pre-revolutionary protest movements, some slaves met in secret to discuss ways to take advantage of the growing rift between patriot and loyalist colonists. Slaves also recognized the contradiction between planters clamoring for liberty while these very same men enslaved thousands of Africans. Richard Henry Lee, of a prominent Virginia family, explained to the House of Burgesses why the slaves would not support the patriots: “from the nature of their situation, [the slaves] can never feel an interest in our cause, because … they observe their masters possessed of liberty which is denied to them.”

Adding insult to injury, in early 1775, soon after the first shots were fired in Massachusetts—at Lexington and Concord—the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, threatened to, and eventually did, offer freedom to the slaves as a punishment to rebellious planters. This confirmed the worst fears of the landed class. Ambivalent slave owners were thereby pushed into open rebellion, and already patriot-inclined owners—such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry—became even more radicalized.

While slavery was statistically more prevalent in the South, the peculiar institution was still a continent-wide phenomenon. Even Benjamin Franklin, of Philadelphia, published advertisements in his newspapers for the sale of slaves and printed notices about runaways. Though Franklin spoke out against slavery, he himself owned five slaves, which, unlike George Washington, he never freed.

Colonial unity trumped abolitionist sentiment, even in New England. The patriots of Boston knew they needed the support of slave-saturated Virginia to win concessions from British authorities. Thus, in 1771, when an anti-slavery bill came before the Massachusetts Assembly, it failed. As James Warren wrote in his explanation to John Adams, “if passed into an act, it should have [had] a bad effect on the union of the colonies.” The first generation of Americans had an opportunity to grant basic human dignity to hundreds of thousands of chattel slaves; instead they chose their own “liberty.”

* * *

Just as hunger for land had sparked off the French and Indian War two decades earlier, so too did land speculation motivate many patriots to oppose the crown. The gentlemen of Virginia, including Washington, Jefferson and Henry, were heavily invested in large tracts of trans-Appalachian land. Jefferson alone claimed 5,000 acres. Their plan was to sell, at a profit, of course, their holdings to small farmers. Thus, when the British authorities drew the Proclamation Line of 1763 and ceded land west of the mountains to placate native unrest and avoid costly frontier wars, the planter class felt betrayed. How could the crown accede to Indian “savages” occupying their God-given lands?

There was also a class component to planter frustration. The Proclamation Line was, of course, an imaginary border, and the British had neither the inclination or military manpower to police it. Despite the law, lower-class farmers jumped the line and set up homesteads across the mountains. From the point of view of gentlemen speculators, these squatters were stealing their land. And, because the Proclamation Line made such settlements illegal, the speculators could not claim title to the land and demand recompense.

Native Americans recognized the threat to their tribal lands and saw the British authorities as their best chance to hold back the settlers. Indeed, in hindsight, we can see that the Proclamation of 1763 might have represented the last chance for genuine native autonomy in North America. These tribes were also far from isolated, backcountry actors. In fact, their trade in deerskins actually tied them to the commercial Atlantic economy to a larger extent than most middling Anglo farmers. Recognizing their leverage, the Ohio Country tribes sought confederation in an anti-British coalition, the better to threaten imperial officials and gain concessions for continued autonomy and protection from the colonists. It worked. The last thing that the deeply indebted British needed was another Indian war.

The Virginians, however, could not care less what the crown wanted. In the fall of 1774, the land speculators tried one last time to obtain the native land. Using a minor Indian raid as the pretext, the colonists launched a devastating attack on Shawnee and Mingo settlements in an attempt to conquer present-day Kentucky. In the short term, an army of 2,000 Virginians achieved its goals and forced the tribes to grant territorial concessions. However, recognizing that the tribes had signed away the land under duress, the crown authorities refused to recognize the land grab.

Like the black chattel slaves of the coastal plantations, the native tribes of the frontier felt no loyalty to the patriot cause. In fact, the imperial status quo better served slave and Indian interests than the faux “liberty” of colonial rebels. The fact that the most vulnerable populations of colonial America opposed revolution and eventually sided with the British most certainly challenges the triumphalist, egalitarian patriot narrative. Indeed, on the issues of slavery and native relations, the British appeared far more liberal than the colonists who were, themselves, seeking their own–in Jefferson’s phrase—“Empire of Liberty.” That empire would prove far more tyrannical for slaves and natives than what King George offered.

* * *

The story of the rebellion that became a revolution, a history of 1763-1775, is nearly impossible to synthesize in one essay, one chapter, or even one book. What, then, can we say? Perhaps only this: The revolution was made by a “coalition of diverse social groups,” motivated by a range of individual grievances, often at odds with one another. The patriots were by no means always democratic, and the loyalists were hardly all tyrannical monarchists. Slaves and Indians were no fans of colonists’ hypocritical, exclusivist notions of (white) liberty and freedom and often favored the crown. There is much to be proud of in the colonial revolt and, too, very much to be ashamed about. Indeed, in the truest sense, we historians are best served when we dutifully and agnostically describe the past in all its diverse, even ugly, manifestations.

Sometimes the myth is more powerful, more influential, than reality. No doubt this has been true of the lead-up to the American Revolution. To critique the motives and tactics of the “patriots” or our Founding Fathers (notice the capitalization!) is to invite rebuke and passionate defensiveness. This is, perhaps, understandable. After all, if the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock represent our first chosen origins myth, then, most certainly, the American Revolution must stand as the second. Who we are, at least who we think we are, is acutely wrapped up in the revolutionary narrative. To question that account is to question us. Yet that is what intellectual honesty and the challenges of the present demand of us—to examine America’s founding origins, warts and all, and strive toward a truly more perfect union.

To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:

● James West Davidson, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle, and Michael B. Stoff, “Experience History: Interpreting America’s Past,” Chapter 6: “Imperial Triumph, Imperial Crisis, 1754–1776” (2011).

● Alfred Young and Gregory Nobles, “Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding” (2011).

● Edward Countryman, “The American Revolution,” Chapters 1-3 (1985).

● Gary B. Nash, “The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America” (2005).

● Woody Holton, “Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia” (1999).

Maj. Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

[The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

Whistleblower: Trump Data Firm Raided 50 Million Facebook Profiles

Facebook has suspended the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica over a massive data breach that allegedly targeted millions of U.S. voters.

A whistleblower charges that the Trump campaign-linked firm reaped information from the profiles of 50 million unsuspecting American Facebook users and built a software program to feed them personalized political advertising during the 2016 election campaign.

The Trump campaign on Saturday denied using the firm’s data, The Associated Press reports. “The campaign used the RNC for its voter data and not Cambridge Analytica,” the campaign said in a statement. “Using the RNC data was one of the best choices the campaign made. Any claims that voter data were used from another source to support the victory in 2016 are false.”

But The Observer reports:

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

The New York Times has the inside story:

As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

In December, special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 election, asked Cambridge Analytica to turn over documents concerning the campaign.

The Associated Press adds: “Britain’s information commissioner is investigating whether Facebook data was “illegally acquired and used.”

—Posted by Gregory Glover

Russia Boots U.K. Diplomats in Spy-Poisoning Tit for Tat

MOSCOW—Russia on Saturday announced it is expelling 23 British diplomats and threatened further retaliatory measures in a growing diplomatic dispute over a nerve agent attack on a former spy in Britain.

Britain’s government said the move was expected, and that it doesn’t change their conviction that Russia was behind the poisoning of ex-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury. Prime Minister Theresa May said Britain will consider further retaliatory steps in the coming days alongside its allies.

The Russian Foreign Ministry ordered the 23 diplomats to leave within a week. It also said it is ordering the closure in Russia of the British Council, a government-backed organization for cultural and scientific cooperation, and is ending an agreement to reopen the British consulate in St. Petersburg.

The announcement followed Britain’s order this week for 23 Russian diplomats to leave the U.K. because Russia was not cooperating in the case of the Skripals, who were found March 4 poisoned by a nerve agent that British officials say was developed in Russia. They remain in critical condition and a policeman who visited their home is in serious condition.

Britain’s foreign secretary accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of personally ordering the poisoning of the Skripals. Putin’s spokesman denounced the claim.

Britain’s Foreign Office said Saturday that “Russia’s response doesn’t change the facts of the matter — the attempted assassination of two people on British soil, for which there is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian State was culpable.”

The British Council said it was “profoundly disappointed” at its pending closure. The organization has been operating in Russia since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.

“It is our view that when political or diplomatic relations become difficult, cultural relations and educational opportunities are vital to maintain on-going dialogue between people and institutions,” it said.

The Russian statement said the government could take further measures if Britain makes any more “unfriendly” moves.

Britain’s National Security Council will meet early next week to consider the next steps, May said.

Western powers see the nerve-agent attack as the latest sign of alleged Russian meddling abroad. The tensions threaten to overshadow Putin’s expected re-election Sunday for another six-year presidential term.

The poisoning has plunged Britain and Russia into a war of recrimination and blame.

British Ambassador Laurie Bristow, who was summoned the Foreign Ministry in Moscow on Saturday to be informed of the moves, said the poisoning was an attack on “the international rules-based system on which all countries, including Russia, depend for their safety and security.”

“This crisis has arisen as a result of an appalling attack in the United Kingdom, the attempted murder of two people, using a chemical weapon developed in Russia and not declared by Russia at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as Russia was and is obliged to do under the Chemical Weapons Convention,” he added.

But Russian lawmaker Konstantin Kosachev blamed Britain for the escalating tensions.

“We have not raised any tensions in our relations, it was the decision by the British side without evidence,” he told The Associated Press.

Kosachev, who heads the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of the Russian parliament, said “I believe sooner or later we will learn the truth and this truth will be definitely very unpleasant for the prime minister of the United Kingdom.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova denied that Russia or the Soviet Union had ever developed Novichok, the class of nerve agent Britain says was used to poison the Skripals.

A Russian scientist disclosed details of a secret program to manufacture the military-grade nerve agents in the 1990s, and later published the formula. But Russia maintains it has never made them.

In a tweet Saturday, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom rejected a Russian suggestion that the nerve agent came from her country.

“Forcefully reject unacceptable and unfounded allegation by Russian MFA spokesperson that nerve agent used in Salisbury might originate in Sweden. Russia should answer UK questions instead,” she tweeted.

Speaking on Russia-24 television, Zakharova on Saturday linked Britain’s angry reaction to the war in Syria. She said Britain is taking a tough line because of frustration at recent advances of Russian-backed Syrian government forces against Western-backed rebels.

Russia argues it has turned the tide of the international fight against Islamic State extremists by lending military backing to Syria’s government. With Russian help, Syrian forces have stepped up their offensive on rebel-held areas in recent days, leaving many dead.

British police appealed Saturday for witnesses who can help investigators reconstruct the Skripals’ movements in the crucial hours before they were found unconscious.

New tensions have also surfaced over the death Monday of a London-based Russian businessman, Nikolai Glushkov. British police said Friday that he died from compression to the neck and opened a murder investigation.

Russia also suspects foul play in Glushkov’s death and opened its own inquiry Friday.

British police said there is no apparent link between the attack on Glushkov and the poisoning of the Skripals, but both have raised alarm in the West at a time when Russia is increasingly assertive on the global stage and is facing investigations over alleged interference in the Donald Trump’s 2016 election as U.S. president.

We Need Dirty Harry

He would not have hesitated. There would be no going back for bulletproof vests or better weapons, waiting for SWAT or following police protocol to protect themselves first. Whether a school building or movie theater, a riot or any situation in which every second lost could mean another child lost, he would take the risk of entering. Risking his life to save others was doing his job. With lives at stake, he never waited for backup. He did his job.

And on Feb. 14, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, he would not have squatted outside in safety while shots were being fired or ordered police to stay 500 feet away and not enter. He would not have endured 11 minutes of shooting before entering, allowing the slaughter of 17 people, plus serious injuries to at least 14 others. He would have confronted the shooter and cried out, “Over here, punk. Do you feel lucky?”

At Virginia Tech, he would have rushed in, and the death toll would not have been 32. At Columbine High School, he would have entered with a gun in one hand while using the other to sip from his cup of morning coffee. He would have entered the swirl of the Rodney King riots in downtown Los Angeles and saved that poor driver being beaten on the ground. In all cases, he would have come out the hero, muttering something about his day being made.

How did he come to exist? In the ’50s, cops were seen as people who could be depended upon to take risks to save your life. But in the revolutionary ’60s, they became political fallouts, “pigs,” tools of “fascist” leaders. As the love-ins went on, so did race riots, and crime was growing. As the ’60s ended, various police overreactions to peace marches—culminating at Kent State University in Ohio in l970—left people wondering whether the police were now political tools who could be turned loose on civilians by right-wing politicians.

In the ’70s, hippies became yuppies concerned with security from growing crime rates. The feeling now was that the police were not doing their jobs well enough and were too involved in protecting their own and polishing their self image. In 1971, police Detective Joseph Wambaugh published his first in a series of police books, many made into movies that presented a humanizing and somewhat sad view of police officers struggling to make pension and overcome personal problems, spending time at doughnut shops and calming domestic disputes.

But the same year, a script originally titled “Dead Right,” written by Julian and Rita Fink and finessed by macho screenwriter John Milius, hit the big screens. Now called “Dirty Harry,” it was supposed to star Frank Sinatra, be directed by Irvin Kershner and be set in New York City. Then Don Siegel took over as director. Sinatra pulled out, citing problems with his hand, which he broke while filming “The Manchurian Candidate.” John Wayne was considered as his replacement but was deemed too old. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman rejected the role for various reasons.

The title role was next offered to Clint Eastwood, and the rest, as they say, is history. Eastwood demanded that the locale be changed to San Francisco, his hometown. Scorpio, the film’s serial killer, was based on the Zodiac Killer, who was still on the prowl in San Francisco (he was never caught). Audie Murphy, the ultimate World War II hero, was offered the role of Scorpio, but he died in an airplane crash before deciding whether to take it. The part went to Andy Robinson.

And so, in 1971, the public picked as its newest hero a no-nonsense cop—inspector Harry Callahan, who never shied away from a shootout or hesitated to risk his life. He was an example of the pendulum swung to the other end; a case of maybe going too far, but audiences loved it. If police protocol was in his way, he ignored it, despite threats from his superiors. It was perhaps the best of Eastwood’s characters and the most dynamic screen savior equipped with quips since Sean Connery said, “Bond, James Bond.” The “Dirty Harry” movies dominated for more than a decade and have left an indelible imprint on American culture.

Callahan was like the police robot in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” If you saw him walking down the street, you would probably get out of his way, but if your life was in danger from some armed men, you could count on him. Back then, if you were a hostage in a bank robbery, you thought someone might actually save you.

But today, when “to protect and serve” means protect and serve the police first and the public second, one might wonder: Where have you gone, Inspector Callahan? A nation turns its fearful eyes to you.

Harry wasn’t there on April 29, l992, during the Rodney King riots, which took place after a predominately white jury acquitted four police officers accused in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. Thousands took part in a four-day spree involving looting, assault, arson and murder. By the time the police, Marine Corps and National Guard restored order, there was nearly $1 billion in destruction, 55 deaths, 2,383 injuries, more than 7,000 fires and 3,100 businesses damaged. Notable during these four days of terror, however, was not so much the actions of the culprits, but the lack of police actions. No cops went into the flare-up after tempers exploded. No one protected victims inside police roadblocks. Police Chief Daryl Gates imitated the Roman emperor Nero, fiddling while his city burned.

Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, was pulled out of his vehicle at the intersection of Florence and South Normandie avenues and beaten by a mob of black gang members. News helicopters recorded the blow-by-blows, including concrete smashed on Denny’s temple while he was unconscious on the ground. Everyone watching on TV had the same response—where were the police? Rather than trying to stop this near murder in progress, they huddled out of harm’s way, reflecting a policy that protected their safety before any civilian’s. Ultimately, Dirty Harrys arrived, although none of them carried a badge—they were black neighbors who, seeing the assault live on television, came to the rescue. They risked being attacked by a frenzied mob and picked up Denny and took him to the hospital. Other non-black motorists were beaten by the same gang members, but no police officers had the nerve to intervene.

Just minutes after Denny was rescued, Fidel Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant, was pulled from his truck and robbed at the same intersection. A rioter smashed his forehead open with a car stereo, while another tried to slice his ear off. After Lopez blacked out, the crowd spray-painted his body black. No police officer came to his aid.

No cop got in his car, crashed the barricade, drove to the site of the beatings, pulled out his Smith and Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum and asked the gang members whether they felt lucky that day.

Seven years later, on April 20, l999, two students—Eric Harris and Dylan Klebod—entered Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colo., to carry out a shooting massacre, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding 24 other people before committing suicide. After a failed attempt to blow up the school cafeteria, they entered the school’s west entrance and began firing around 11:20 a.m.—outside at students on a grassy knoll and a soccer field, as well as inside the school. A deputy sheriff arrived and fired back but did not go in. Instead, he radioed for assistance. Dirty Harry also might have radioed, but he would have gone in and ended it before help arrived.

By 11:30 a.m., several deputy sheriffs and police officers arrived. They helped evacuate students; one even saw a shooter pass by a window. Law enforcement, fearing booby traps and setups, chose not go in, despite knowing that the shooting was continuing and aimed at students needing rescue. Police safety came before that of students who were brought up watching Alan Ladd movies that led them to believe police would risk their lives to protect them. A SWAT team arrived by noon but did not enter until about 2:30 p.m. It wasn’t until 3:25 p.m. that the SWAT team finally made it into the school library. By then, the shooting had long since stopped, with the self-execution of the killers. Earlier, coach Dave Sanders had posted a sign on a window: “I AM BLEEDING TO DEATH.” It was ignored. Sanders died nearly three hours later from blood loss, surrounded by about 30 terrified students. His last words were reported by a student to be “tell my family I love them.”

Inspector Harry Callahan would have finished it moments after it started. The death toll would have been limited. A coach might be alive. Who are we to protect if not our youth?

And then, in yet another April, this one in 2007, the 16th to be exact, a sociopathic student, Seung-Hui Cho, wanting to please his gods—the Columbine killers—and seek revenge on those who belittled him, killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. The first two killings occurred around 7:15 a.m. in a dorm building. The police arrived, determined it was an isolated event and treated it that way. Nice theory. But what if they were wrong? On what evidence could the investigators conclude beyond the shadow of a doubt that no killer was still on scene, stalking other students? With kids at stake, how do you not consider and protect against worst-case scenarios? It is not as though madmen haven’t gone berserk in schools, post offices and elsewhere before. Why wasn’t the school evacuated? This was a fresh murder scene. Police should have been left behind; the school should have been searched. If one cop with a true heart had stayed at the scene, dozens of people might still be alive.

As it was, around 9:20 a.m., the killer did return to shoot 30 more people, taking his time between each shot. Some reports say that rather than go in immediately, the police took the time to set up and follow their active-shooter protocols. The school says police cut the chains Cho had put on doors to prevent his victims from exiting and then went right in. I, of course, am not a witness. But it is clear that as the sound of gunshots continued, neither the security guards nor any school personnel took chances that might have saved some lives. Virginia law requires school security guards to complete a police training course. They carry weapons. April 16, 2007, was the day they were hired for. I know a Los Angeles police officer—Richard Blue—who in an earlier career in security (after getting police-training certified) entered a burning building to pull out two people who had been tied up by drug dealers. He considered it the kind of event he had taken the job for.

Sadly, there was no Dirty Harry wannabe in the Virginia Tech security force. And ironically, earlier, Virginia House Bill 1572—intended to prohibit state universities from limiting or abridging the right of a student who possesses a valid concealed-handgun permit from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun—had been introduced by Delegate Todd Gilbert. That proposed legislation, too, is dead.

That is not to say that Virginia Tech did not have its hero, a man who understood what “loco parentis” means. A professor stood at the door and held it closed so his students could climb out the windows to safety. One student tried to get him to come, but he would not budge from blocking the door. Like James Whitmore placing the kids in the sewer tunnel in the 1954 movie “Them,” he died for his heroics. He was an unexpected hero with a past he obviously learned from. Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, was a Holocaust survivor. He was all John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Here’s to you, Professor Librescu—the public, as Paul Simon wrote, “loves you more than you will ever know. Wo-wo-wo.” Dirty Harry’s badge number 2211 now rests with you.

Talks on $1.3 Trillion Spending Bill Hit Critical Stage

WASHINGTON—Top-level congressional talks on a $1.3 trillion catchall spending bill are reaching a critical stage as negotiators confront immigration, abortion-related issues and a battle over a massive rail project that pits President Donald Trump against his most powerful Democratic adversary.

The bipartisan measure is loaded with political and policy victories for both sides. Republicans and Trump are winning a long-sought budget increase for the Pentagon while Democrats obtain funding for infrastructure, the opioid crisis and a wide swath of domestic programs.

The bill would implement last month’s big budget agreement, providing 10 percent increases for both the Pentagon and domestic agencies when compared with current levels. Coupled with last year’s tax cut measure, it heralds the return of trillion-dollar budget deficits as soon as the budget year starting in October.

While most of the funding issues in the enormous measure have been sorted out, fights involving a number of policy “riders” — so named because they catch a ride on a difficult-to-stop spending bill — continued into the weekend. Among them are GOP-led efforts to add a plan to revive federal subsidies to help the poor cover out-of-pocket costs under President Barack Obama’s health law and to fix a glitch in the recent tax bill that subsidizes grain sales to cooperatives at the expense of for-profit grain companies.

Trump has privately threatened to veto the whole package if a $900 million payment is made on the Hudson River Gateway Project, a priority of top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York. Trump’s opposition is alarming northeastern Republicans such as Gateway supporter Peter King, R-N.Y., who lobbied Trump on the project at a St. Patrick’s luncheon in the Capitol on Thursday.

The Gateway Project would add an $11 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River to complement deteriorating, century-old tunnels that are at risk of closing in a few years. It enjoys bipartisan support among key Appropriations panel negotiators on the omnibus measure who want to get the expensive project on track while their coffers are flush with money.

Most House Republicans voted to kill the funding in a tally last year, however, preferring to see the money spread to a greater number of districts.

“Obviously, if we’re doing a huge earmark … it’s troubling,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a leader of House conservatives. “Why would we do that? Schumer’s pet project and we pass that under a Republican-controlled Senate, House and White House?”

Schumer has kept a low profile, avoiding stoking a battle with the unpredictable Trump.

There’s also a continuing battle over Trump’s long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall. While Trump traveled to California on Tuesday to inspect prototypes for the wall, what’s pending now is $1.6 billion for earlier designs involving sections in Texas that double as levees and 14 miles (23 kilometers) of replacement fencing in San Diego.

It appears Democrats may be willing to accept wall funding, but they are battling hard against Trump’s demands for big increases for immigration agents and detention beds they fear would enable wide-scale roundups of immigrants illegally living in the U.S.

Meanwhile, a White House trial balloon to trade additional years of wall funding for a temporary reprieve for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children — commonly called “Dreamers” — landed with a thud last week.

Republicans are holding firm against a provision by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., designed to make sure that Planned Parenthood, intensely disliked by anti-abortion Republicans, receives a lion’s share of federal family planning grants.

But another abortion-related provision — backed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. — that would strengthen “conscience protection” for health care providers that refuse to provide abortions remained unresolved heading into the final round of talks, though Democrats opposing it have prevailed in the past.

Chances for an effort to attach legislation to permit states to require out-of-state online retailers to collect sales taxes appear to be fading. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., faces strong opposition from Democrats on a change to campaign finance laws to give party committees like the National Republican Senate Committee the freedom to work more closely with their candidates and ease limits to permit them to funnel more money to the most competitive races.

One item that appears likely to catch a ride on the must-pass measure is a package of telecommunications bills, including a measure to free up airwaves for wireless users in anticipation of new 5G technology.

Mueller Reportedly Receives Notes of Fired FBI Official

Truthdig update: The Associated Press reported Saturday evening that Andrew McCabe’s notes had been “provided to the special counsel’s office and are similar to the notes compiled by dismissed FBI chief James Comey.” It added: “McCabe’s memos include details of his own interactions with the president, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation who wasn’t authorized to discuss the notes publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. They also recount different conversations he had with Comey, who kept notes on meetings with [President] Trump that unnerved him.”

WASHINGTON—Andrew McCabe, the onetime FBI deputy director long scorned by President Trump and just fired by the attorney general, kept personal memos regarding Trump that are similar to the notes compiled by dismissed FBI chief James Comey detailing interactions with him, The Associated Press has learned.

It was not immediately clear whether any of McCabe’s memos have been turned over to special counsel Robert Mueller, whose criminal investigation is examining Trump campaign ties to Russia and possible obstruction of justice, or been requested by Mueller.

McCabe’s memos include details of interactions with the president, among other topics, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation who wasn’t authorized to discuss the memos publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The disclosure Saturday came hours after Trump called McCabe’s firing by Attorney General Jeff Sessions as “a great day for Democracy.” Sessions, acting on the recommendation on the recommendation of FBI disciplinary officials, acted two days before McCabe’s scheduled retirement date.

McCabe suggested the move was part of the Trump administration’s “war on the FBI.” Trump tweeted in praise of Sessions’ announcement Friday night, asserting without elaboration that McCabe “knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels off the FBI!”

Later, Trump claimed there was “tremendous leaking, lying and corruption” atop the FBI, and departments of State of Justice, but offered no evidence.

An upcoming inspector general’s report is expected to conclude that McCabe, a Comey confidant, authorized the release of information to the media and was not forthcoming with the watchdog office as it examined the bureau’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

“The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability,” Sessions said in a statement.

McCabe said his credibility had been attacked as “part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally” but also the FBI and law enforcement.

“It is part of this administration’s ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the special counsel investigation, which continue to this day,” he added, referring to Robert Mueller’s probe into potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. “Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the special counsel’s work.”

Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, cited the “brilliant and courageous example” by Sessions and the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility and said in a statement Saturday that the No. 2 Justice Department official, Rod Rosenstein, should “bring an end” to the Russia investigation “manufactured” by Comey.

Dowd told the AP that he neither was calling on Rosenstein, the deputy attorney government overseeing Mueller’s inquiry, to fire the special counsel immediately nor had discussed with Rosenstein the idea of dismissing Mueller or ending the probe.

McCabe asserted he was singled out because of the “role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath” of Comey’s firing last May. McCabe became acting director after that and assumed direct oversight of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s actions, including Comey’s ouster, constitute obstruction of justice. McCabe could be an important witness.

Trump, in a Tweet early Saturday, said McCabe’s firing was “a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI — A great day for Democracy.” He said “Sanctimonious James Comey,” as McCabe’s boss, made McCabe “look like a choirboy.”

McCabe said the release of the findings against him was accelerated after he told congressional officials that he could corroborate Comey’s accounts of Comey’s conversations with the president.

McCabe spent more than 20 years as a career FBI official and played key roles in some of the bureau’s most recent significant investigations. Trump repeatedly condemned him over the past year as emblematic of an FBI leadership he contends is biased against his administration.

McCabe had been on leave from the FBI since January, when he abruptly left the deputy director position. He had planned to retire on Sunday, and the dismissal probably jeopardizes his ability to collect his full pension benefits. His removal could add to the turmoil that has enveloped the FBI since Comey’s firing and as the FBI continues its Trump campaign investigation that the White House has dismissed as a hoax.

The firing arises from an inspector general review into how the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation. That inquiry focused not only on specific decisions made by FBI leadership but also on news media leaks.

McCabe came under scrutiny over an October 2016 news report that revealed differing approaches within the FBI and Justice Department over how aggressively the Clinton Foundation should be investigated. The watchdog office has concluded that McCabe authorized FBI officials to speak to a Wall Street Journal reporter for that story and that McCabe had not been forthcoming with investigators. McCabe denies it.

In his statement, McCabe said he had the authority to share information with journalists through the public affairs office, a practice he said was common and continued under the current FBI director, Christopher Wray. McCabe said he honestly answered questions about whom he had spoken to and when, and that when he thought his answers were misunderstood, he contacted investigators to correct them.

The media outreach came at a time when McCabe said he was facing public accusations of partisanship and followed reports that his wife, during a run for the state Senate in Virginia, had received campaign contributions from a Clinton ally. McCabe suggested in his statement that he was trying to “set the record straight” about the FBI’s independence against the background of those allegations.

With the FBI disciplinarians recommending the firing, Justice Department leaders were in a difficult situation. Sessions, whose job status has for months appeared shaky under his own blistering criticism from Trump, risked inflaming the White House if he decided against firing McCabe. But a decision to dismiss McCabe days before his retirement nonetheless carried the risk of angering his rank-and-file supporters at the FBI.

McCabe became entangled in presidential politics in 2016 when it was revealed that his wife, during her unsuccessful legislative run, received campaign contributions from the political action committee of then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton friend. The FBI has said McCabe received the necessary ethics approval about his wife’s candidacy and was not supervising the Clinton investigation at the time.

But Trump pounded away on Twitter Saturday: “How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wife’s campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M … How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!”

Greg Campbell: Bearing Witness to the Hell of War (Audio and Transcript)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer welcomes Greg Campbell, a journalist and filmmaker whose articles have appeared in The Atlantic and The Economist, and whose books include “Blood Diamonds” and “Pot, Inc.”

Campbell and Scheer discuss “Hondros,” Campbell’s 2017 documentary about his friend Chris Hondros, whose photos captured the consequences of war up close. Hondros died in a mortar attack in Libya in 2011.

During their discussion, Campbell tells Scheer that Hondros believed his job was to convey to Americans what was happening overseas in their name. They talk about Hondros’ famous photograph of a little girl covered in blood after her family was killed by American soldiers in Iraq and her appearance as a young woman in the documentary.

Campbell also shares how both crowdfunding and actress Jamie Lee Curtis played integral parts in getting the film made.

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

—Posted by Eric Ortiz

RS: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where hopefully the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Greg Campbell, a writer, a journalist, and now a film director, at least in the last four, five years. He’s been making a film about his childhood friend who went on to become an internationally known news photographer in Kosovo, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and finally died in covering the war in Libya. And that was in 2011. Hondros is the name of the film, and it reminded me so much of why I–the negative side for me as well as, of course, the positive in learning, but the scary side. I didn’t have extensive coverage of war, but I remember the first time I went to Vietnam and, you know, found myself in the middle of a firefight, and actually lost control of some of my bodily functions. And people told me, soldiers and journalists who were out there, you know, that was sort of normal. I mean, it gets really crazy and scary. And of course in the film Hondros, about Chris Hondros, he ends up giving his life, as many journalists have done. But the photojournalists are a particular breed, and your film captures that around this very significant photographer. The courage–you have a compelling scene at the beginning of the movie, or very early on, where he gets his, probably his most famous photograph of someone on a bridge in Liberia. And it becomes world known; what does that, what does it show? Is it the–it’s a young soldier, it’s a rebel; is he scared, is he empowered? And that sort of put Chris Hondros on the map as one of the great combat photographers, is that not the case?

GC: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Chris had been working in difficult regions in Africa and the Middle East prior to that photograph becoming so popular. And it was that that really sort of put him on the map and brought him to the attention, to the upper stratospheres of his profession, where he always sought to be. I was in close touch with him when he was covering that conflict in the summer of 2003 in Liberia, and it was an extremely dangerous situation. Because the capital city was surrounded by rebel soldiers, and those rebel soldiers were getting closer and closer, and the noose was tightening around the city center, which of course was filled with civilians. And they were being targeted with indiscriminate fire from mortars and from, of course, small arms fire. And it was extremely dangerous, because Chris and the other photographers who chose to stick it out in that environment were, of course, susceptible to death or injury, just as the people that they were covering. And I spoke to Chris on the phone when he was weighing the option of perhaps evacuating, taking up the invitation by the U.S. Marines at the nearby embassy to evacuate any journalists who wanted to leave. And he said there were two things going sort of through his mind, and one was that he didn’t feel that it was fair to leave the people behind who couldn’t stay without somebody witnessing what they were going through. And the second was sort of a decision that he made, that he’d spent so much time and energy arriving to this place to do this work that he felt was important to do, that it just, he didn’t feel like it was being true to his own goals to evacuate when it really became hairy and really harrowing. So this image that you’re talking about was on the very middle of a hotly contested bridge, and the encroaching forces were on the far side of the bridge, and Chris was with the government forces on his side. And he had an epiphany that if he was going to cover this war the way that he felt it needed to be covered, he needed to be right in the midst of it. So when the soldiers charged the bridge and launched an attack on the opposing forces on the other side, he was right there with them, and vulnerable to the incoming fire. And he took a photograph, which you’ll see in the film is stunning in its sort of duplicity; it shows you the violence and the chaos, of course, of that particular moment, but it also shows one of the paradoxical things about being in a war, which is the exhilaration that can come from it.

RS: But you also see fear in his face, and you can interpret that shot, that photo, any which way you want. I mean, either it’s a terrified young man or it’s an exuberant young man, and maybe all those emotions are in there, in the thrill of battle and the fear of battle. But let me say something about your film and you, first of all, by way of introduction. This is your only film; I mean, you’ve done some other shorts and so forth, but you’re basically a print person; you’ve edited the Boulder magazine, and so forth. And you guys met in, what, a freshman high school English class. And you were making sort of a home video movie, and were sort of play at war, right?

GC: Yeah.

RS: Yeah, playing at war. And what I liked about the film, I have some criticisms that I’ll get to, but what I very much liked about the film is we see a guy who really is quite exceptional, Chris Hondros. And he learns–I mean, it’s not the kid playing war games–the power of his photography, and the important thing of his witness; he witnesses the carnage, the suffering. Just to mention another one of his iconic photographs, maybe the best one that’s in the film, one of the most powerful, is when a car of civilians is shot up by Americans in Iraq, and they were not a threat to anybody. And suddenly there’s this young woman and her parents are dead, have been shot in the car. And then what I thought was very powerful in your film is you didn’t leave it there; you found that young woman later, you interviewed her. And she was–you know, no, she wasn’t forgiving, and she didn’t understand why this happened; she was angry. And she thought the Americans were monsters for killing her family. And this was years later, and she’s obviously a very thoughtful person, but she wasn’t going to say, oh, “stuff happens in war,” or “collateral damage”–no. No, she said, you folks are the devil, the Americans, and you visited the carnage of the devil upon us in Iraq, and I’m not going to forgive, and you killed my family. That was very powerful in the film. You went and found the woman that was the subject of what is probably his most famous photo, isn’t it?

GC: Yeah, I would agree with that, I think that’s definitely his most famous photograph, and it’s certainly the one that I think resonated the most from his extensive coverage of the war in Iraq, the one that really reached the American public. And we didn’t know what she was going to say when we interviewed her, and in fact we figured there was probably an even chance that she would not want to be interviewed at all. And we approached her at a difficult time in Iraq’s history, the summer of 2014, which was when ISIS had first come on the world stage and seized control of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, which is where she lived. And we weren’t sure if she was within the city limits still, or if she was alive, or where she may have been, if she had fled. So my crew and I took about three weeks on the ground in Iraq to finally locate her. And you know, as you saw and commented upon, we gave her the opportunity to speak if she wanted it, and she had quite a bit to say.

RS: That scene is worth the price of admission, I mean, worth your movie; that one interview you have, for my money, is where you capture the real horror of war, particularly a war that is very difficult to justify.

GC: Yeah.

RS: I mean, the movie does not examine whether any of these wars are needed or not, but the subtext really is that this is unnecessary violence. I mean, in every instance you describe, you really don’t offer a plausible explanation of why we’re there, or why there’s a civil war, or why one part of a community is killing another part. And you know, I think if the movie, it didn’t set out to do it, but I think the movie begs the question of, did any of this have to happen. And your interview with that woman, young, now she’s older, she was what, about four or something when her family was killed right before her eyes.

GC: Yeah, she was five years old.

RS: Five years old. And the American sergeant who orders the firing and so forth, he’s really contrite later in life; you have an interview with him and so forth. Very much liked the scene, by the way, that Chelsea Manning revealed and got her sent to jail, of shooting up a car, that had Reuters photographers and other civilians there in Iraq. And I must say, in that scene, the question that she raises is, it’s not just you make mistakes, you Americans; it’s not just that you came here and messed us up; she is suggesting that we are actually evil in our indifference, our contempt, our use of violence. And you know the fact is, we are responsible for about half of the weapons in the world; we have been the, and Martin Luther King pointed out just shortly before he died, around Vietnam, “We are the major purveyor of violence in the world today,” he said. And you know, a lot of this carnage that you describe in your film is something that we bear a significant, if not always major, responsibility for. And so what your, that woman–I mean, it just got me, that scene.

GC: Yeah.

RS: Where she just lays it out. You know? Who are you–and I’ll never forget the words, do you remember the exact words she–she uses something like “evil” or “monster”–

GC: Oh, yeah. She said if the person offering the apology was in front of her, she would want to drink their blood. And that even if they had drunk every drop, she still wouldn’t be satisfied.

RS: That is an incredible–I mean, what did you think when she said it? Because she’s such an appealing person, you know, as a–

GC: She’s very strong, yeah–

RS: And the–sorry, just for people who haven’t seen the movie, and they should see the movie–when her parents are killed before her eyes, you know, she’s just this pathetic child, and you feel for her. But she comes back in your film as, you know, a full-grown woman with ideas and anger. And it’s not that she’s a crazy person; she’s laying it out the way she sees it. And yeah, that scene, when she says even if I drank the blood of the people–and we meet one of the people who did it, right, in your film.

GC: Yes.

RS: You know, so set that stage, because I do think it’s really incredibly powerful.

GC: I appreciate that. And it is powerful, and I think that there’s a lot to unpack from that. And I think the place to start would be, you know, Chris’s role as he saw it was to be in these places when things like this happened. So that he could convey back to the public in the United States what was happening in their name. And that was information that he thought was important for people to have, so that when the time came to fulfill our obligations to democracy and vote and look clearly in the eyes of what the decisions that we make, at not just the policy levels but in the ballot box, what they look like on the ground and the effects that they have. One of the most moving quotes that he said about that situation was that when people say that war is hell, this is what they’re talking about. They’re not just talking about battlefield stuff and the tanks on one side of a battlefield versus tanks on another; we’re talking about the civilian toll. The casualties that happen far from the eyes of people who voted for the politicians who are implementing these policies and making these decisions to send our troops into harm’s way. And therefore putting civilians in harm’s way. And one of the greatest reactions I had to that scene was from an experienced conflict photographer who we feature in the film, Mike Kamber, who spent many, many years in Iraq. And his opinion about that scene was that it just really typified what was happening in Iraq: the chaos that you’re putting the soldiers into in this impossible situation where they’re fighting in urban environments against an enemy that doesn’t necessarily raise a flag or wear a uniform, in the midst of a civilian population with arbitrary rules of engagement in extremely hostile situations. And of course, things like this are going to occur. And while there had been reports of civilian casualties, and reports of rules of engagement going awry, this was the first occasion when it was brought out with photographic proof. I mean, you can’t get much more raw than seeing a little girl, anguished in ways that we can’t even imagine, covered in blood from her mom and dad who were just shot to death in front of her eyes. And those images brought home immediately the stories and the effects of our foreign policy on the civilians of this country we were occupying. And that’s what Chris’s role [was]. So even though there’s not, as you said, perhaps a solution or a question raised as to why we were in these places, the role that Chris had was to inform people about the consequences of decisions that were made at sort of the top policy level. And because it was so powerful, because this series of images led to such outrage and conversations about what we’re doing in Iraq at that time, Chris was interviewed very extensively. He spoke about his experiences and his opinions about this particular event; he and I spoke to this soldier that you mentioned, extensively, once in 2009 and once again for this film. And the only person that we hadn’t heard from, who was alive and capable of commenting about this, was the person at the center of it all, who had become an icon of civilian suffering. Not just in the Iraqi war, in my opinion, but in many wars, any war. And so I felt an obligation to find her and ask if she wanted the opportunity to comment about this life-changing event that she had endured. And she did; she was eager to sit down and speak with us, and as I said, I didn’t know what she was going to say. I think in my heart, you know, in the back of my mind, I was taken aback when she made those comments. And it feels a little foolish now to think that I would be startled, because clearly, what else was she going to say.

RS: [omission for station break] I’m right back with Greg Campbell, who has made a really interesting documentary about the photojournalist Chris Hondros; it’s called Hondros. He had to be on the bridge, he had to be there when the girl was shot; and he died, he died because he was in Libya and when, you know, a truck got exploded, a car got exploded and he died. And he felt if he’s not there, there is no witness. And that is the interesting contradiction now of American policy abroad; we can intervene with drones and everything else without even putting a single soldier in harm’s way, and the American public doesn’t really care very much. And yet, there are people at a wedding where that drone hits, or where our bombs hit or anywhere else, that are going to be killed, and their families killed. And this young woman, that scene, for my mind, it’s not only the high point of your film, it’s one of the great photojournalisms that you pulled off.

GC: Thank you.

RS: So just set that stage a little bit more. She provided a whole context. You began with the question, or–just tell us.

GC: Sure thing. Let me back you up one second just to correct one factual thing, is that when Chris was killed in Libya, he was killed in a mortar attack, it wasn’t a–

RS: Oh, I’m sorry.

GC: That’s OK, I just wanted to point that out, it wasn’t a car bomb. So when we visited Samar Hassan in the place that she was taking refuge from the ISIS occupation of her hometown in Mosul, you know, mainly I wanted to just hear her recount the story and tell us what she remembered about the night and how it affected her. And clearly, that it did affect her is sort of, that was a foregone conclusion. And you know what we found was a woman who, young woman who is headstrong; she seemed to be very independent, but at the same time was, admitted to having psychological troubles because of her–untreated psychological troubles because of the things that she experienced, this event. And the event, I’ll just lay that out, was in the city of Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. She and her family, I think she had five brothers and sisters including herself, were in the backseat of the family Volkswagen. And mom and dad were in the front seat of the car. And there was a curfew in this town set by the U.S. military. And to hear Chris explain it, the curfew wasn’t, you know, strenuously enforced; it was more of a suggestion, get off the streets by the time the sun’s down. And these folks were coming back from a health clinic. The mother had some stomach pains or an upset stomach, and the father was going to take her to see the local doctor, and all the kids insisted on coming with them. And so they all piled into the car, and they were late leaving the doctor’s to return home. So as they were doing so, in the empty streets, they were the only car out and about, and the sun was just at dusk, and so it was very difficult to see. The lights were on in the car, they were approaching an intersection. And then we switch to the perspective of the soldiers, who see what they believe to be a suicide bomber coming their way, because they’d come under grievous attack in that particular town; it was hotly contested at that point in time, and the insurgents that they were combating were perfecting the ability to drive up with a car packed full of explosives and detonate it right in front of the Americans. And so that’s what they assumed was going to happen. And Chris told me that he, too, assumed that that was going to happen. And they therefore opened fire on the car after firing a couple of warning shots. And then when you, you know, look at the perspective again from inside the car, it’s difficult to see anything; you know, the soldiers aren’t holding their lights, they’re obviously blending into the environment because they’re on a combat patrol in the middle of the night, using night vision gear. And so the people can’t see them in the car. And when they hear shooting, the instinct naturally is to drive faster and get away from wherever the shooting is taking place. So that could have been what was going through the father’s mind when he accelerated the car, and he didn’t realize he was accelerating towards the soldiers. And you know, it was just a tragic mistake, and it’s the kind of thing that happens in war.

RS: None of this had to happen. We decided–we, we American voters, the people we elected, and speak for us and so forth–that we were going to reorder Iraq, OK? We didn’t like their dictator. And the fact is, the excuse was 9/11; in your film you talk about how Chris Hondros, after 9/11 he was just off to the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that just fundamentally changed his life, and he sort of became a full-time photojournalist of war, combat. But the fact is, you know, the excuse for going into Iraq was the World Trade Center–well, there was no connection; Iraq was one of the places in the world where Al-Qaeda had the most difficult time penetrating, right? And the area where this young woman’s family got killed, there was no ISIS; ISIS is an outgrowth of the destruction of the Baath party, and the Sunni representation, and the Shiite militia coming to power and so forth. And so none of this had to happen. This was something we engineered; we have to take ownership. And again, if I have any, you know, hesitation about my enthusiasm for the film, which is certainly a really significant work. But you know, what you’re basically saying is it comes out, the message comes out subtly, and that Chris Hondros understood that. That this, you know, these wars–whether they’re tribally inspired or they’re inspired by empire, and America has the biggest empire the world has ever seen now, in terms of military power–that’s what causes the chaos. It doesn’t just happen. I mean, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think her anger–she was saying no, this was not an accident, and I’m not forgiving it. And by the way, the American in your film, the American sergeant that you interviewed, he’s a troubled person, and he didn’t think it had to happen. So why don’t you give us both sides of the coin, ‘cause that’s really what your film is all about. It’s about, you know, the collateral damage that is documented.

GC: I think it’s important, too, to just understand that the film is also from Chris Hondros’s perspective, and why he felt it was important to be in the places that he went, and why he put himself in these dangerous environments that easily could have resulted in his injury, and ultimately did result in his death. Because it’s for the very reasons that you’re bringing up, which is, when you say “none of this needed to happen,” and that the war was built on lies–there’s no disagreement with your analysis. And at the ground level, what’s needed in order to make our voters and the people who decide who’s going to be in positions in government, representing us with their strokes of the pen, the very first cog in the machinery is the photojournalist, the people on the ground level who are there to be able to have access to the soldiers who are fighting in our name, to have, to brave going behind the enemy lines, to look at the evidence of collateral damage when the Pentagon claims that it has pinpoint precision and never kills a civilian by accident. To be able to have those people who are on the ground, watching these things. And I think the instinct is to demonize the people who are in immediate proximity to a moment, whether it’s the person behind the wheel of the car, if we’re talking about this particular situation, who ignored a warning, you know, from the soldiers who fired warning shots over the top of the car, and accelerated foolishly with his whole family in the car, he must have known he was risking their lives, what’s wrong with him; that’s one perspective. You could also say that the soldiers were trigger-happy and should have given the benefit of the doubt to the driver who was approaching them. But neither one of those holds up when you look at the tragedy of the individual situation, and I think Chris saw his responsibility as not to necessarily track backwards in time and assign retroactive blame for how we got into the positions that we were in, but rather to examine what was actually unfolding as a result of decisions taken in the past, so that they could be changed or at least better informed once the opportunity to decide about something like that in the future came again.

RS: The film, really its strong, strong message, is you have to put yourself in the shoes of the people that are getting killed. And the civilians that are getting killed. And that’s what he basically does there.

GC: Yeah.

RS: And I must say, to your credit, and we haven’t talked at all about how you made this film, the crowdsourcing and Jamie Lee Curtis and other people in Hollywood who helped get it out–I mean, we should talk a little bit about that. But I want to praise your skill here, because you’re, as I say, you’re a print journalist and an editor and so forth; you chose that trajectory. And you put yourself in harm’s way to make this film; it was obviously a labor of love. And you learned the trade; I mean it’s, you know, you’re the director, and it is a, you know, I’m not an expert on films, but it seems to me an incredibly effective job. And so just talk a little bit about that.

GC: Well, first of all, thank you for the wonderful compliments; I appreciate them very much. When I was first contemplating the idea of doing a tribute to Chris’s life and examining his legacy, both with the camera and without, you know, being a print journalist my first instinct was perhaps I should write a book and do a biography. But clearly, Chris’s visual artistry just demanded a film; there was just no other way to be able to discuss or present his work without being able to see it. So it became clear pretty quickly that the movie was the route to go. And yeah, I’ll be the first to admit that I knew very, very little blundering into this industry, and there was a lot of trial by fire, a lot of trial and error. And I was pretty fortunate to have attracted some skilled people who had knowledge and experience in this industry from the beginning. And you mentioned Jamie Lee Curtis; there was a real turning point for our film, and it actually involved the young lady we’ve been discussing. We were trying to track her down, as I mentioned; there was a lot of turmoil going on suddenly and unexpectedly in Iraq, and we’d lost touch with her and her family. And we called one of my teammates, a producer of mine, called The New York Times bureau in Baghdad and asked if they had any idea where she might be located. They had done a story on her, a brief piece in the wake of Chris’s death, and interviewed her about where, you know, how her life had turned out. And they said that they lost touch as well, and they weren’t sure how to reach her, but suggested that maybe we try Jamie Lee Curtis. And I think we all thought we were hearing him incorrectly, and we said Jamie–who’s that guy, you know? And it turned out, no, we’re talking about Jamie Lee Curtis, the Hollywood royalty Jamie Lee Curtis, the one you’re thinking of. And apparently she had been so moved by Chris’s photographs from Tal Afar, and so touched by the tragedy that befell this family, that she did the same thing that we had done and reached out to the same person at The New York Times to see if she could help or assist in any way, if there was a fund set up for her, or whatever may be the case. And there’s not and there wasn’t, and so she just left her contact information if she could ever be of any assistance. And I emailed her right away, and she emailed right back, and she was a staunch supporter of our film, and an amateur photographer herself. And it was just, it was a real perfect sort of partnership. And she brought along her godson, another well-known person in Hollywood, Jake Gyllenhaal. And Jake had just started a production company, and immediately when he saw some of our early scenes he could see pretty quickly that Chris Hondros, there was something special about him and about the work that he did, and he wanted to get on board with it as well.

RS: You know, we’re going to wrap this up soon, but I’m always looking for role models. I teach at the University of Southern California in the Annenberg School, and what you did here is really, you provide a, not only, obviously we can’t all be Chris Hondros and we can’t all take those risks and danger, and I’m not saying–and you did take some risks to make this movie. But the fact is, you used the Internet in a very positive way. You didn’t have to go to some big-money people at first; you didn’t have to get, you know, big authorization, you know. You did crowdsourcing, and you raised some, what, 80, $90,000 fairly quickly.

GC: Yeah.

RS: I looked at the original pitch and everything, a pretty convincing pitch. And that’s kind of a model for responsible journalism. Everybody’s bemoaning now, you know, what’s going to happen to journalism–well, you did very good journalism, excellent journalism here yourself. And you did it by saying, OK, I’m going to make this movie; I don’t know how to make a movie, I don’t even, and I don’t have the money. And so just, let’s end on a positive note here that people can make choices about doing significant work, journalism, and they don’t always have to sell out, which is unfortunately what a lot of we hear about.

GC: Well, I think it’s a great note to end on, because the people who supported our kickstarter campaign don’t get nearly as much love and recognition as they deserve. Because you know, we were trying to raise a mere $30,000 to afford to buy a camera and maybe do a test interview to see if it was even worthwhile. And we raised that amount of money within four days of our 30-day campaign online. And the donations came from all around the world, in like literally every corner. Some people gave a dollar, some people gave $10,000. And to see the sort of outpouring that was purely motivated by their love and admiration of Chris Hondros, it just really convinced me that we were on the right path to make a film about his life. I clearly was convinced of that from the beginning, but this was just really positive reinforcement, and I owe everybody who donated and supported our campaign a real debt of gratitude.

RS: And we owe you a debt of gratitude for keeping the memory and the example of Chris Hondros alive. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist several times; he, really incredible, iconic photographs. That’s going to wrap it up for this week. But thanks for joining us on this edition of Scheer Intelligence. And we’ll be back next week, but I can’t leave without thanking our producers, Rebecca Mooney and Joshua Scheer; our excellent engineers, Mario Diaz and Kat Yore, here at KCRW. And see you all next week.

 

 

MSNBC Commentaries Are Too Reliant on CIA Spin

MSNBC prides itself for progressive reporting on national security issues but continues to use apologists for the Central Intelligence Agency in reporting on key intelligence issues. The network’s reliance on former deputy director of the CIA John McLaughlin is an excellent example of the skewed and tailored information that it offers to viewers on matters dealing with CIA. McLaughlin, a former colleague of mine at the CIA who I remember as an amateur magician, regularly pulls the wool over the eyes of such MSNBC veterans as Andrea Mitchell.

The most recent example took place over the past several days, when McLaughlin made the case for confirmation of Gina Haspel as the first woman to become director of the CIA. McLaughlin and former CIA directors Leon Panetta and John Brennan referred to Haspel as a “seasoned veteran” who had the support of senior CIA leaders. Perhaps MSNBC should acknowledge the fact that Deputy Director McLaughlin was Haspel’s boss during this terrible period in American history.

Haspel arrived at the CIA in the late 1980s as I was preparing my resignation, but I know from former colleagues that she is also known as “bloody Gina” for her role as a clandestine operative who was a cheerleader for torture and abuse. Her role as a commander of a secret prison in Thailand where waterboarding was practiced and her support for destroying the 92 secret tapes that revealed the sadistic practices of the CIA are well known. These practices went far beyond the practices that were sanctioned in the unconscionable memoranda from the Department of Justice on the euphemistically labeled “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.”

McLaughlin’s role at the CIA is less well known. Although CIA director George Tenet is infamous for telling President George W. Bush in December 2002 that it would be a “slam dunk” to provide intelligence to take to the American people to support the invasion of Iraq, it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the “slam dunk” briefing at the White House in January 2003. The briefing was based on the phony National Intelligence Estimate that McLaughlin endorsed in October 2002 along with the infamous White Paper that the CIA delivered to the Congress on the eve of the vote to go to war against Iraq. The White Paper was a violation of the CIA’s charter that prohibits the use of information to influence public opinion.

McLaughlin then doubled down in January 2003 when he provided false intelligence and false assurances to Secretary of State Colin Powell who regrettably used CIA’s so-called intelligence in his speech to the United Nations in February 2003 to make the case for war to an international audience. The Bush administration would have gone to war even if the CIA had gotten the intelligence right, but it is conceivable that honesty from Tenet and McLaughlin and a strong CIA stand could have created more opposition to the war from Congress, the media, and the public. McLaughlin regularly tells his MSNBC audiences that CIA officials tell “truth to power.” Well, he certainly didn’t at a particularly important point.

More recently, McLaughlin led the CIA’s attempt to discredit the authoritative Senate intelligence committee report on the CIA’s program of torture and abuse. Like the White Paper in 2002, the CIA report violatedf the CIA charter against influencing public opinion in the United States. In the report titled “Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program’” McLaughlin was joined by such CIA apologists as Tenet, former directors Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, and former deputy director Michael Morell. There were other apologists involved in the project such as Philip Mudd, who comments regularly on CNN, and Jose A. Rodriguez, the godfather of torture and abuse, who was permitted to publish a book that denied there was torture and abuse.

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by Norman Solomon

In “Rebuttal,” McLaughlin and the others lie about the information it obtained from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, and ignore the fact that the information obtained from waterboarding KSM was already available. The apologists also misrepresented the number of detainees in CIA custody, and “Rebuttal” corroborates other lies as well. McLaughlin and Brennan still maintain that the CIA never lied to policymakers about the information obtained from the use of torture. Thus, we have one of the biggest lies of all from a former deputy director of the CIA and a former director of the CIA, respectively, who regularly “inform” the American people on cable television.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of “Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism,” and “Whistleblower at the CIA: An Insider’s Account of the Politics of Intelligence.”  His forthcoming book is “American Carnage: Donald Trump’s War on Intelligence.”  Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

Mike Pompeo, a Statesman Opposed to Peace

Secretary Tillerson was far from an ideal choice, but his anointed successor at the State Department—Mike Pompeo—may ditch diplomacy altogether and start a war!

We both attended West Point. That’s where the commonalities end. I’ve been a soldier opposed to (endless) war; he’ll be a statesman opposed to peace. That should give us cause for pause.

It is a sad day indeed when one finds himself pining for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But that’s where we are. I never really bought into the whole success in profit-driven business equates to success in diplomacy thing. Besides, let us not forget that Tillerson gutted the State Department, failed to fill key posts, and fought to cut his own budget. That was shocking, especially given that the sitting Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, once asserted, back when he was a marine general, that if the State budget was cut, “he’d need to buy more bullets.” Nonetheless, Tillerson is out and CIA director Mike Pompeo—a far more alarming choice—is nominated to replace him.

Maybe the notoriously thin-skinned president couldn’t abide being called a “moron” by a senior cabinet secretary. Still, publicly at least, the president seemed to indicate that it was “serious policy differences” which led to the firing. Given that Secretary Tillerson regularly tempered Trump’s more extreme proposals—like tearing up the Iran deal, threatening “fire and fury” in North Korea, and backing the Saudi blockade of tiny Qatar—and that Mike Pompeo is a known Trump supplicant, that’s all the more disquieting.

The only bright spot in the move is that Trump decided not to elevate Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)—a reported frontrunner and notorious neoconservative hawk—to replace Pompeo at CIA. Nevertheless, Trump’s choice of Gina Haspel to take over the agency is potentially disturbing. Haspel served during the dark days of Bush-era torture; even notorious hawk John McCain (R-Az.) has expressed concern about her potential complicity in the torture regime, though a full accounting will no doubt come out in her confirmation hearings.

So who is Mike Pompeo? The short answer: a startlingly hawkish Tea Party Republican oilman with a penchant for combative rhetoric and a near hysterical hatred for Iran. But he’s smart—valedictorian of his West Point class and a graduate of Harvard—and that makes him even more dangerous. His primary qualification, though, is his loyalty and propensity for mind-melding with his boss, Donald Trump. For the last year, he often personally delivered Trump’s presidential daily briefing (PDB) at the White House each morning and they agree on just about everything; as Trump says of Pompeo: “we’re always on the same wavelength.”

What exactly can Americans expect from a Secretary Pompeo? It’s hard to know, for sure, but his past actions and statements offer plenty of hints. A neocon ideologue, he’ll no doubt be a savvy political actor; in a Washington where no one seems to remain for long in Donald Trump’s good graces, Pompeo has consistently impressed his boss. Last year, Harvard’s Stephen Walt called him “the most politically motivated CIA director since perhaps [Reagan-appointed] William Casey.”

He’s also pretty fanatical on a range of civil liberties issues. Pompeo is a staunch supporter of domestic surveillance, and even called for the death penalty for Edward Snowden. Steven Aftergood, a director at the Federation of American Scientists told reporters that “Mr. Pompeo is literally an extremist.”

The bigger issue is Pompeo’s neoconservative predisposition for preventive war and expansive military intervention. He’s basically a charter member of the Iran-hysteria-club dominating the contemporary Republican (and sometimes Democratic) establishment. Pompeo wants to immediately tear up the Iran deal, which will leave the U.S. as the sole party to pull out of the seven nation accord. Back in 2014, when Pompeo was still a Kansas Congressman, he boasted that it would take only “2000 sorties to destroy [i.e. bomb] the Iranian nuclear capacity.” Well, Director Pompeo, what happens the day after the US starts a war with Iran? What are the second and third-order regional effects? None of that seems important to the likes of Pompeo; he wants war with Iran, and he might just get it.

Furthermore, while CIA Director, he ordered the release of files that purportedly proved collusion between Al Qaeda and Iran. Never mind that Bin Laden and the Islamic State were longtime antagonists on opposites sides of the regional Sunni-Shia divide. Pompeo knows what he’s doing. These were the same devious tricks another neocon administration—that of George W. Bush—used to sell a deceitful invasion of Iraq. Soldiers like mine paid the price for that disaster on the streets of Baghdad. Pompeo’s a West Pointer; he should know that real American men and women will be the ones to die in the next reckless war—the one he seems to want in Iran.

It is hard to say if America has ever had a Secretary of State more pugnacious and bellicose than the Secretary of Defense, but that’s where the country will likely be in 2018, with Mike Pompeo at the helm of State. Pompeo, it appears, wants war, but it is Mattis who truly knows war; and though they’re both rather hawkish in foreign affairs, my bet is on Mattis—the Marine Corps general, no less—to exercise more caution in a crisis.

That, needless to say, is disturbing. America’s already got a Department of Defense. If Pompeo sits atop State, the US might as well ditch the veneer of diplomacy and rename the agency—call it the Department of War.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the US government.

Vatican Convicts Guam Archbishop in Sex Abuse Trial

VATICAN CITY—The Vatican on Friday removed the suspended Guam archbishop from office and ordered him not to return to the Pacific island after convicting him of some charges in a sex abuse trial.

The Vatican didn’t say what exactly Archbishop Anthony Apuron had been convicted of, and the sentence was far lighter than those given high-profile elderly prelates found guilty of molesting minors. It amounts to an early retirement anywhere in the world but Guam, a remote U.S. Pacific territory where nearly everyone is Roman Catholic.

Apuron is 72, while the Vatican retirement age is 75.

The Vatican spokesman declined to comment. Calls placed to the tribunal judge weren’t answered. Apuron’s whereabouts weren’t immediately known.

“While I am relieved that the tribunal dismissed the majority of the accusations against me, I have appealed the verdict,” said a statement from Apuron distributed by his Guam attorney, Jacqueline Terlaje. “God is my witness; I am innocent and I look forward to proving my innocence in the appeals process.”

Pope Francis named a temporary administrator for Guam in 2016 after Apuron was accused by former altar boys of sexually abusing them when he was a priest. Dozens of cases involving other priests on the island have since come to light, and the archdiocese is facing more than $115 million in civil lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse by priests.

Apuron strongly denied the charges and said he was a victim of a “calumny” campaign. He wasn’t criminally charged. The statute of limitations had expired.

A statement from the tribunal in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex abuse cases, said Apuron had been convicted of some of the accusations against him.

Under an appeal, the penalties could be suspended until the case is resolved. However, it’s not clear whether that has happened now that Apuron has indicated he has appealed.

In the past, when an elderly or infirm priest has been convicted by the Vatican of sexually abusing minors, he has often been removed from ministry and sentenced to a lifetime of “penance and prayer.” Younger priests convicted of abuse have been defrocked, removed from ministry or forbidden from presenting themselves as priests.

Francis, however, has intervened in a handful of cases to lower sentences, and several high-ranking Vatican prelates oppose defrocking convicted molesters and have long lobbied for more lenient sentences.

In the case of Apuron, no restrictions on his ministry as a priest were announced.

An ailing Apuron greeted Francis at the pope’s Feb. 7 general audience.

Apuron is one of the highest-ranking churchmen to be convicted by a Vatican sex abuse tribunal, and his rank as archbishop may have played a role in his seemingly light sentence.

Assuming the evidence against him was grave and credible, the Vatican might still have been reluctant to remove him from the clerical state, as it has done in hundreds of cases of defrocked priestly abusers, because Apuron would still remain a bishop theologically speaking, noted Kurt Martens, professor of canon law at Catholic University of America in Washington.

That means he could continue ordaining priests — ordinations that would be considered illicit but still valid — a schismatic conflict the Vatican would want to avoid.

The Catholic community on Guam has been convulsed by the Apuron scandal, with weekly protests demanding his ouster.

One of the former altar servers who accused Apuron of molesting him said he felt relieved by the Vatican’s announcement.

“The verdict was what we were hoping for,” Roland Sondia said from Guam, where it was already Saturday. “I think the fact that he won’t be able to return to the island is justice.”

While The Associated Press doesn’t typically name victims of sex abuse, Sondia has come forward publicly identifying himself as one of Apuron’s accusers.

The attorney for the victims said he was overjoyed with the outcome. “We’re ecstatic. It’s a justified verdict,” said David Lujan.

Archbishop Michael Byrnes issued a statement early Saturday afternoon, also praising the decision.

“It is a monumental marker in our journey toward healing as one Church, one people in God. I pray that all people would embrace this call for healing,” Byrnes said.

The accusations against Apuron also involved grave financial problems in the archdiocese and the purchase of a valuable property by Apuron for a diocesan seminary that he actually turned over to a controversial Catholic movement.

A lay group that agitated for Apuron’s removal, “Concerned Catholics of Guam,” pushed for an investigation into the archdiocesan seminary, which Apuron opened in 1999 and moved to an 18-acre (seven-hectare) property thanks to a $2 million anonymous donation.

A Vatican-backed inquiry found the property’s control had effectively been transferred to Neocatechumenal Way administrators without Vatican approval.

The seminary controversy came to a head when the Carmelite order of religious sisters revealed it had provided the $2 million donation, but said the money had been intended for an archdiocesan seminary to train diocesan priests, not a Neocatechumenal Way seminary to train missionaries.

In a remarkable 2016 news conference to denounce the transfer, Carmelite Mother Superior Dawn Marie announced that her small community of nuns had left the island after a 50-year presence because of the “toxic environment” created by the controversy.

Melinda Burke, a parishioner of Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral-Basilica — Guam’s mother church where Apuron is pastor— said she was worried about Apuron’s health when she heard he was found guilty.

“I love him very much,” she said. “Archbishop Apuron has a very beautiful, Christ-like side.”

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Grace Garces Bordallo contributed to this report from Hagatna, Guam.