Chris Hedges's Blog, page 91

Biden Heads to Iowa Looking for a Rebound in Key State

DES MOINES, Iowa—Joe Biden’s eight-day bus tour across Iowa comes with a message: Reports of his demise in the nation’s first presidential caucus state have been greatly exaggerated.

Biden’s aides acknowledge that he must sharpen his pitch before the Feb. 3 caucuses that launch Democrats’ 2020 voting. Yet the former vice president’s advisers reject any characterization of the 18-county swing that was beginning Saturday as a campaign reset, even with polls showing that Biden’s standing in Iowa has slipped in recent months.

They frame the extended trip as an effort to demonstrate wide appeal and harden support across a Democratic electorate whose top priority is defeating President Donald Trump. Conversations with advisers and supporters reveal a quiet confidence that the 77-year-old candidate retains a broad base of support and is well-situated to recover lost ground.

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“As people get closer and closer to February, they become more and more practical about this,” said former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who recently gave Biden his most high-profile Iowa endorsement yet. “He can make the strongest case, among all the candidates, that he is in a position to get things done, and he is in a position to win.”

Iowa polls suggest that Biden, while a front-runner nationally, is in a jumble near the top. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg appears to hold a narrow edge over Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 70, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 78. The senators have animated the party’s left flank, while the 37-year-old Buttigieg joins Biden in Democrats’ moderate wing but is calling for generational change.

Biden opened November with an underwhelming speech at the state party’s “Liberty & Justice” gala. While Buttigieg and Warren roused thousands of supporters in a Des Moines arena, Biden ticked through his standard applause lines as whole sections of seats purchased by his campaign sat empty.

In southeast Iowa, the state party’s Rural Caucus vice chairman says Biden’s footprint isn’t visible. “I know the names of the people who are supporting various other candidates,” Glenn Hurst said. “But in terms of people out there knocking on doors, who attend other campaign events, district events, I can’t name a member of the southeast Iowa Democrats who’s supporting Joe Biden.”

Fairly or not, Biden’s national staff has fueled skeptical assessments with pronouncements that he doesn’t have to win Iowa to win the nomination. Iowa is overwhelmingly white; Biden’s national advantage leans heavily on non-white voters who help determine outcomes in Nevada, South Carolina and many March 3 Super Tuesday states.

Yet all the handwringing misses key variables in Iowa, according to Vilsack and other Biden supporters.

They contend that, public enthusiasm aside, Biden has the broadest range of support both demographically and geographically, especially in rural and small-town Iowa and among the growing minority population that, while small, could prove important with so many candidates dividing the overall caucus vote. Those Biden organizers that get so much criticism, the campaign says, spend their days not with local party officials, but with volunteers knocking on doors and making calls. Their focus: reliable caucus participants, plus disaffected Republicans and independents.

“The media seems to have picked up this narrative that the Biden campaign is not doing well or not as well as it should,” said longtime party activist and Biden supporter Phyllis Hughes Ewing, daughter of a former Iowa governor and U.S. senator. “I’m on the phones with voters two nights a week for several hours at a pop. I’m a boot on the ground, and that’s not what I’m seeing.”

Collectively, it’s a wide-net strategy the campaign predicts will yield a surprising delegate haul from Iowa’s complex caucus process.

The bullishness starts with the viability threshold requiring candidates to get 15% support in a given precinct to have votes counted toward delegates. Biden’s team believes he’ll be viable in every one of the 1,679 precincts on caucus night, a reach even other leading candidates may not match. Then, they believe Biden will be a top beneficiary of “realignment” votes — subsequent ballots that allow voters who supported a nonviable candidate to choose another who’s still standing.

That process could be a double boost for Biden, their theory goes. First, top contenders like Warren or Buttigieg whose support might be anchored in more liberal cities and suburbs would get no practical benefit from first-ballot votes in more rural precincts where they fall short of 15%. Second, several of the lower tier candidates running as moderates — Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, for example — could fall short of viability across much of the state. Biden advisers confirmed they already are mapping out realignment ballot strategy.

Two other key Democratic constituencies also are in play in Iowa, even if they aren’t the dominant forces they are in other states: organized labor and minority voters.

Biden won the endorsement of the International Association of Fire Fighters at the outset of his campaign, and the organization already has tapped its locals across the state to canvass. “We understand what needs to be done to get people out to caucus,” said Harold Schaitberger, the union’s national president, adding that he already has representatives on the ground and will have organizers in precincts across the state on caucus night.

For minority outreach, the campaign recently hired state Rep. Ras Smith, a member of the Legislature’s Black Caucus. He plans to hold caucus training events and outreach for minority voters who may be first-time participants. The campaign also is making an aggressive play for Latino voters, with more than a dozen bilingual organizers, including deputy political director Claudia Chavez.

Beyond the complexities of caucus rules and the nuances of turnout, Biden is perhaps leaning most strongly on an Iowa precedent for moderation. His preferred model is 2004, when Howard Dean wowed progressives for much of 2003, only to watch John Kerry come from behind as voters embraced the establishment favorite as the ideal to take on Republican President George W. Bush.

“History does indicate that Iowans start out with a very progressive-leaning focus early in the race but come home to a pragmatic, presidential choice at the end,” said Matt Paul, who ran Hillary Clinton’s successful 2016 Iowa campaign.

Among Kerry’s key backers in 2016: the firefighters’ union.

Schaitberger smiled as he recalled a newspaper headline in late fall of 2003: “Kerry dead in the water.”

Unions Dig In to Protect Hard-Fought Health Plans

Deep under Los Angeles, laborers are busy digging more subway lines to connect a complex and diverse populace with sometimes conflicting goals. While changing the city, union workers like those from Laborers Union Local 300 will also have much to do with rebuilding a health care system that is presently unfair, overpriced and cumbersome.

Local 300, with more than 8,000 members, is affiliated with the 100,000-member Los Angeles-Orange County Building Trades unions. Together, the unions are a considerable political force in Southern California. Union leaders, believing they have already negotiated better plans with employers, are skeptical about a government plan like Medicare for All that would eliminate their coverage. This attitude, not exclusive to unions, is influencing the health insurance debate and helping shape the Democratic presidential contest.

I visited Local 300 headquarters, located in a largely Latino working-class section of Los Angeles, recently because my notions of Medicare for All had been challenged by some Local 300 leaders.

I’ve long thought that the way to go for the United States was a system in which everyone would have a Medicare card, show it at a hospital, urgent care facility, pharmacy or doctor’s office and get care without deductibles, surprise charges, premiums or maddening denials of care. In other words, give everyone the care those over 65 receive from Medicare and millions more through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid for low-income earners.

I brought this up at a luncheon where I happened to be seated with some Local 300 folks. One of them said he had good insurance and didn’t want to change. He gave me some examples of what is obviously a terrific plan.

I saw there was more to the story than I had thought. As with most political debate, the rhetoric just skimmed the surface.

Local 300’s members do work like construction, asbestos abatement, maintenance and a number of other tasks. The website of the local’s parent, Laborers’ International Union, said the average wage for a union laborer is $28.08 an hour, compared to $18.10 for non-union workers.

The workers on the subway project, called miners, remove the muck and dirt left by machines actually digging the tunnels, run by the operating engineer members. The Laborers Union members also install the waterproofing and concrete and help build the subway stations.

I parked in the union headquarters’ underground garage and took the elevator up to the second floor. Local official Ernesto Panoja greeted me and brought me to a conference room where the union chief, business manager Sergio Rascon, awaited me.

We went over Local 300’s health plan. Rascon said Local 300 members have a choice of three plans, which start at $20 co-pays per visit, One is with Kaiser Permanente and another is an employee preferred option, in which recipients can pick a doctor or hospital that is in a network. The third is a preferred provider option, allowing recipients to go outside the network if they don’t mind a higher co-pay.

I told him it sounded like a good plan, more specific than what we’d heard from the Democratic candidates—and certainly better than President Donald Trump’s proposal, which would wipe out the Affordable Health Act known as Obamacare.

Rascon made it clear that Local 300 wants to preserve its health care plan.

“I don’t have a problem with” Medicare for All, said Rascon, “providing our plans are left alone. Our plans have been going for decades. They do not cost the taxpayer a dollar.”

His words echoed those of Richard Trumka, who heads the AFL-CIO. Trumka told reporters earlier this year, “There’s no question that ultimately we need to establish a single-payer system, but there has to be a role for those hard, hard-fought, high-quality plans that we’ve negotiated.”

On another day, I talked on the phone to Kurt Peterson, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, which represents 32,000 workers at hotels, restaurants, airports, sports stadiums and convention centers. Like the Laborers Union, Unite Here offers a wide-ranging health care program. The main source of care is Kaiser, although union members can go to other physicians in a network. Participants pay a $10 co-pay. Generic prescriptions that Peterson said were “relatively affordable” are available. The union has its own dental clinic. “Our economic package counting health care pension is well over $35 an hour,” he said.

But to Peterson, that’s not the whole story. The local has spent a huge amount of time bargaining for these benefits. “We and other unions have struck, spent countless hours at [the] bargain table, countless hours. … It is ridiculous how much time and sacrifice we have put into it—energy, strikes, picket lines—to maintain our excellent health insurance,” he said. “There has to be a better way.”

“We want universal health care. It is a no-brainer,” he said. It would remove health care from the bargaining table. “If we remove that, we can organize around wages, pensions, work rules,” Peterson said, expressing a view counter to that of leaders of some other unions.

But chances of that happening are unlikely. Even if the Democrats win the White House and the Senate and retain control of the House, Medicare for All in all likelihood would be sunk by the same combination of insurance companies and medical business interests that have killed revolutionary reform for many decades.

In addition, as David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times:

Many Americans are happy with their current insurance, polls show. Even among those who aren’t, many worry about being forced into a new plan. “Loss aversion is a hell of a drug,” notes Brendan Nyhan, a University of Michigan political scientist.

Facing such doubts about her ambitious Medicare For All plan, Sen. Elizabeth Warren threw a surprise into the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination when she scaled back her proposal.

Under her latest version, private insurance plans, such as those negotiated by the Laborers Union Local 300 and Unite Here Local 11, would not be eliminated, at least in the first three years of a Warren presidency. Rather, Americans could use their private insurance or buy into current Medicare. That brings Warren into line with the proposals of former Vice President Joe Biden and several other candidates. The entire package would have the effect of improving the Affordable Care Act.

That’s a contrast to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the godfather of current Medicare For All plans. Under Sanders, private plans, either those negotiated by union and management or provided by non-union companies, would disappear.

It’s important to note that Warren plans to do much to reduce the income inequality that plagues the country. She vows to repeal the Trump tax cuts and raise taxes on wealthy households and corporate profits. The proceeds would finance initiatives that would greatly improve American life. Among them are universal child care, increased spending on public schools, the canceling of student debt, free college, increased Social Security payments and combating climate change.

All that would help construction workers, asbestos removers, wait staff, bell attendants and many others who want to move up the economic ladder. And they could keep the health insurance they fought so hard to win.

Iraqi Prime Minister to Resign in Wake of Deadly Protests

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s prime minister announced Friday that he would submit his resignation to parliament, a day after more than 40 people were killed by security forces in protests and following calls by Iraq’s top Shiite cleric for lawmakers to withdraw support.

The move by Adel Abdul-Mahdi, which came 13 months after he took office, triggered celebrations by anti-government protesters who have been camped out for nearly two months in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square. Young men and women broke out in song and dance as news of the imminent resignation reached the square, the epicenter of the leaderless protest movement.

But in the event of an actual resignation, the road to a new government was uncertain and the possibility of political crisis hung in the air, Iraqi officials and experts warned.

In a statement, Abdul-Mahdi said he had “listened with great concern” to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s sermon and made his decision in response to the cleric’s remarks and to “facilitate and hasten its fulfillment as soon as possible.”

“I will submit to parliament an official memorandum resigning from the current prime ministry so that the parliament can review its choices,” he said. Abdul-Mahdi was appointed Iraq’s fifth prime minister since 2003 as a consensus candidate following months of political wrangling between rival political blocs.

If accepted when put to vote, Abdul-Mahdi’s resignation would signal a return to square one in those slow-moving negotiations, Iraqi officials and experts said.

Abdul-Mahdi would be the second prime minister in an Arab country to be forced out by mass protests recently. In Lebanon, the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri exactly a month earlier, on Oct. 29, led to further political gridlock and uncertainty.

Abdul-Mahdi’s rise to power was the product of a provisional alliance between parliament’s two main blocs — Sairoon, led by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and Fatah, which includes leaders associated with the paramilitary Popular Mobilization Units headed by Hadi al-Amiri.

In the May 2018 election, neither coalition won a commanding plurality, which would have enabled it to name the premier, as stipulated by the Iraqi constitution. To avoid political crisis, Sairoon and Fatah forged a precarious union with Abdul-Mahdi as their prime minister.

Now, with his resignation, unresolved disputes between the coalitions threaten to re-emerge, two Iraqi officials said.

“The two of them need to come to an agreement again for us to see a new prime minister,” said a senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Abdul-Mahdi had alluded to this challenge implicitly in earlier statements, saying he would resign, but only if an alternative candidate was found for the premiership.

Officials also questioned Abdul-Mahdi’s decision to submit his resignation via the more time-consuming route of parliament, requiring MPs to vote, rather than sending it directly to the president, who has the power to accept it immediately and demote the government to caretaker status until a new one is formed.

One Iraqi official said one of two things could happen: “There’s going to be a lot of horse-trading going on, or it could be paralysis, and nothing changes.”

The resignation also creates legal uncertainties as the constitution does not provide clear procedures to guide lawmakers in the event of a premier stepping down, experts said. The key issue was how long Abdul-Mahdi’s government could maintain caretaker status in the event of protracted political negotiations.

“To my understanding there is no clause (in the constitution) that says how long he can remain in the post once his resignation is accepted,” said Sajad Jiyad, the managing director of Bayan Center, an Iraq-based think tank.

The federal Supreme Court might have to step in, he added, if the caretaker government stays for too long and if parliamentary blocs are unable to come to an understanding.

In his weekly Friday sermon delivered via a representative in the holy city of Najaf, Al-Sistani said parliament, which elected the government of Abdul-Mahdi, should “reconsider its options.” His comments prompted political parties to issue calls for the government to step down.

“We call upon the House of Representatives from which this current government emerged to reconsider its options in that regard,” al-Sistani said in the statement — a clear sign he was withdrawing his support for the prime minister.

It was not immediately clear whether Abdul-Mahdi’s resignation would placate protesters, who are now calling for the removal of the entire political class that has ruled Iraq since the 2003 downfall of Saddam Hussein. Nearly 400 people have been killed in the bloody crackdown on protests since Oct. 1, most of them young demonstrators who were shot dead or killed by exploding tear gas canisters fired by security forces.

Amira, a 25-year-old protester, said the resignation should have come weeks ago.

“We will not stop with the prime minister. We still have more fighting to do. We will push forward until our demands are met,” she said, declining to give her full name, fearing retaliation.

Forty protesters were shot dead by security forces in Baghdad and the southern cities of Najaf and Nasiriyah on Thursday, in a sharp escalation of violence that continued Friday.

Three more protesters were shot and eight wounded by security forces Friday in Nasiriyah when demonstrators attempted to enter the city center to resume their sit-in, security and hospital officials said. Security forces had fired live rounds the previous day to disperse protesters from two key bridges, killing 31 people.

Al-Sistani also said protesters should distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and those seeking to turn the movement violent, following the burning of an Iranian consulate building Wednesday in Najaf. Government officials said the fire was perpetrated by saboteurs from outside the protest movement.

After the sermon, the Islamic Dawa party called for parliament to convene immediately and choose an alternative government. Fatah said it would convene with other political blocs to discuss options.

A former oil and finance minister and an ex-vice president, the 77-year-old Abdul-Mahdi was seen as a political independent when he took the post in October 2018. He was Iraq’s first prime minister from outside the Dawa party in 12 years.

His administration’s policies were characterized by small gains to improve the day-to-day lives of Baghdadis. He moved his offices out of Baghdad’s highly secure Green Zone on the first day of his term, saying he wanted to bring his government closer to the people, while removing wartime cement barriers that had closed Iraqis off from much of the city.

In the halls of power in Baghdad, his office worked behind the scenes to streamline the administration and improve decision-making. But the effects of those efforts were not visible to an Iraqi public impatient for reform.

Abdul-Mahdi was also often caught in the middle of rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran, with many perceiving his government and certain staffers as being close to Tehran. Reducing Iraq’s reliance on Iranian electricity imports to meet consumer demand was a key concern of Washington.

Protesters widely reject growing Iranian influence over Iraq state affairs. In Baghdad on Friday, demonstrators gathered around the historic Rasheed Street near the strategic Ahrar Bridge and burned the Iranian flag, chanting “Iran out!”

___

Associated Press Writer Murtada Faraj in Baghdad contributed to this report.

2 Killed in London Stabbings; Police Fatally Shoot Suspected Attacker

LONDON — A man wearing a fake explosive vest stabbed several people Friday in London, killing two in what police are treating as a terrorist attack before being tackled by members of the public and then fatally shot by officers on London Bridge, officials said.

Metropolitan Police Chief Cressida Dick said two stabbing victims had died and three injured people were being treated in a hospital.

She said police were working “at full tilt” to determine whether anyone else was involved in the attack.

The violence erupted two-and-a-half years after a van and knife attack in the same area killed eight people, and less than two weeks before Britain holds a national election. The main pollical parties temporarily suspended campaigning in London as a mark of respect.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that “to the best of our knowledge, the incident has been contained” but that details were still emerging.

Johnson’s office said the prime minister would chair a meeting of the government’s emergency committee, COBRA, later Friday evening.

Metropolitan Police counterterrorism chief Neil Basu said the suspect appeared to be wearing a bomb vest but it turned out to be “a hoax explosive device.”

Basu said officers were keeping “an open mind as to any motive.”

Dick, the police chief, said officers were called just before 2 p.m. to Fishmongers’ Hall, a conference venue at the north end of London Bridge. The pedestrian and vehicle bridge links the city’s business district with the south bank of the River Thames, was reported about 2 p.m.

Cambridge-based prison-education organization Learning Together was holding an event there Friday, and the University of Cambridge said it was “gravely concerned” about students, staff and alumni who might have been caught up in the attack.

Minutes after the stabbings report, witnesses saw a knifeman being wrestled to the ground by members of the public on the bridge before armed-response officers shot him dead.

One video posted on social media showed two men struggling on the bridge before police pulled a man in civilian clothes off a black-clad man on the ground. Gunshots followed. Another depicted a man in suit and overcoat holding a long knife that apparently had been taken from the attacker.

Other images showed police, guns drawn, pointing at a figure on the ground in the distance.

Karen Bosch, who was on a bus crossing the bridge, said she saw police “wrestling with one tall, bearded man” and then heard “gunshots, two loud pops.”

She said the man “pulled his coat back which showed that he had some sort of vest underneath, whether it’s a stab vest, or some sort of explosive vest, the police then really quickly moved backwards, away.”

Another bus passenger, Amanda Hunter, told the BBC that the vehicle “all of a sudden stopped and there was commotion and I looked out the window and I just saw these three police officers going over to a man.”

“It seemed like there was something in his hand, I’m not 100% sure, but then one of the police officers shot him.”

Police confirmed that the man died at the scene.

The mayor praised the “breathtaking heroism of members of the public who literally ran towards danger not knowing what confronted him.”

“They are the best of us,” Khan said.

The prime minister also praised the bystanders, and said anyone who was involved in the attack “will be hunted down and will be brought to justice.”

Cars and buses on the busy bridge were at a standstill after the shooting, with a white truck stopped diagonally across the lanes. Video footage showed police pointing guns at the truck before moving to check its container.

London Bridge station, one of the city’s busiest rail hubs, was closed for several hours after the attack.

Scores of police, some armed with submachine guns, flooded the area, ushering office workers and tourists out of the area, which is packed with office buildings, banks, restaurants and bars. Staff in nearby office blocks were told to stay inside.

As police cleared the streets, staff in shops and restaurants ushered customers into storerooms and basements. Some had been through similar traumatic events: In June 2017, eight people died in a van and knife attack in the same area.

In that attack, three assailants inspired by the Islamic State group ran down people on the bridge, killing two, before stabbing several people to death in nearby Borough Market.

The 2017 fatal attack took place days before a general election. Britons are due to go to the polls again on Dec. 12.

Political leaders expressed shock and sorrow at Friday’s attack.

“We will not be cowed by those who threaten us,” Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said. “We must and we will stand together to reject hatred and division.”

Both Labour and the Conservatives suspended campaigning in the city after the attack and the prime minister was also canceling political events for Saturday.

Another London bridge was the target of an attack in March 2017, when attacker killed four people with a car on Westminster Bridge then fatally stabbed a police officer before security forces shot and killed him in a courtyard outside Parliament.

Security officials earlier this month downgraded Britain’s terrorism threat level from “severe” to “substantial,” which means an attack is seen as “likely” rather than “highly likely.” The assessment was made by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, an independent expert body that evaluates intelligence, terrorist capability and intentions.

The U.K.’s terror threat was last listed as “substantial” in August 2014; since then it has held steady at “severe,” briefly rising to “critical” in May and September 2017.

Trump Thanks Troops in Afghanistan, Says Taliban Want a Deal

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — President Donald Trump paid a surprise Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan, where he announced the U.S. and the Taliban have been engaged in ongoing peace talks and said he believes the Taliban want a cease-fire.

Trump arrived at Bagram Air Field shortly after 8:30 p.m. local time Thursday and spent 3½ hours on the ground during his first trip to the site of America’s longest war. He served turkey and thanked the troops, delivered a speech and sat down with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani before leaving just after midnight. He arrived back in Florida, where he is spending the holiday weekend, early Friday morning local time.

As per tradition, reporters were under strict instructions to keep the trip a secret to ensure the president’s safety in Afghanistan. About 12,000 U.S. forces remain in the country.

Traveling with Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming and a small clutch of aides, including his acting chief of staff, press secretary and national security adviser, Trump appeared in good spirits as he was escorted around the base by heavily armed soldiers, as the smell of burning fuel and garbage wafted through the chilly air. Unlike last year’s post-Christmas visit to Iraq — his first to an active combat zone — first lady Melania Trump did not make the trip.

Trump’s first stop was a dining hall, where the crowd erupted into cheers when he arrived. There, he served turkey to soldiers dressed in fatigues and sat down for a meal. But he said he only tasted the mashed potatoes before he was pulled away for photos.

“I never got the turkey,” he told the troops. “A gorgeous piece of turkey.”

During his visit, Trump announced that the U.S. and Taliban have been engaged in peace talks and insisted the Taliban want to make a deal after heavy U.S. fire in recent months.

“We’re meeting with them,” he said. “And we’re saying it has to be a cease-fire. And they don’t want to do a cease-fire, but now they do want to do a cease-fire, I believe … and we’ll see what happens.”

The trip came after Trump abruptly broke off peace talks with the Taliban in September, canceling a secret meeting with Taliban and Afghan leaders at the Camp David presidential retreat after a particularly deadly spate of violence, capped by a bombing in Kabul that killed 12 people, including an American soldier.

That ended a nearly yearlong effort by the U.S. to reach a political settlement with the Taliban, the group that protected al-Qaida extremists in Afghanistan, prompting U.S. military action after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. U.S. and international forces have been on the ground ever since.

It was not immediately clear how long or substantive the U.S. reengagement with the Taliban has been.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said the Taliban’s stance is unchanged. He said the United States broke off talks and when it wants to resume the Taliban are ready.

Trump ran his 2016 campaign promising to end the nation’s “endless wars” and has been pushing to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and in the Middle East despite protests from top U.S. officials, Trump’s Republican allies in Washington and many U.S. allies abroad. For months now, he has described American forces as “policemen” and argued that other countries’ wars should be theirs to wage.

Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians and more than 2,400 American service members have been killed since the war began 18 years ago.

Just last week, Trump flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to oversee the transfer of the remains of two Army officers killed when their helicopter crashed as they provided security for troops on the ground in Logar province in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban still control or hold sway over about half of the country, staging near daily attacks targeting Afghan forces and government officials.

The U.S. and the Taliban in September had been close to an agreement that might have enabled a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Nonetheless, Trump said Thursday that he was proceeding with a plan to reduce U.S. troop levels to about 8,600, telling reporters we’re “bringing down the number of troops substantially.”

Still, he said, the U.S. will stay in the country “until we have a deal or we have total victory.”

Trump made the announcement as he met with Ghani, the Afghan president. Ghani thanked the Americans who have made the “ultimate sacrifice” in Afghanistan and assured the president that Afghan security forces are increasingly leading the fight.

“In the next three months, it’s going to be all Afghanistan!” Ghani said.

Ghani also praised Trump for the October mission that killed Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Afghan leader also indicated, as Trump himself has, that the al-Baghdadi mission was even more significant than the 2011 mission targeting al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden. The bin Laden mission was ordered by then-President Barack Obama.

“President Trump, people talked a lot about bin Laden, but what you did to eliminate al-Baghdadi, who was an organizer and not a talker, is a much greater accomplishment,” said Ghani, in remarks to U.S. troops before Trump’s departure.

The trip came a week after the Taliban freed an American and an Australian who had been held hostage since 2016 in exchange for three top Taliban figures, a move that has been widely seen as a possible entree to rekindling peace talks.

The White House took pains to keep the trip a secret after Trump’s cover was blown last year when Air Force One was spotted en route to Iraq by an amateur British flight watcher.

Cellphones and other transmitting devices were confiscated for most of the trip from everyone traveling aboard Air Force One. And Thanksgiving-themed tweets were teed up to publish ahead of time from Trump’s account to prevent suspicions arising about the president’s silence.

A small group of reporters was told to meet Wednesday night on the top floor of a parking garage in Maryland and was transported in black vans to Andrews Air Force Base. Nobody would confirm where he was going. The only guidance: Dress casually and warmly. Meanwhile, the president was secretly flying back from Florida, where reporters had been told he’d be spending Thanksgiving at his Mar-a-Lago club.

The plane he’d flown to Florida — the modified 747 painted in the iconic white and blue of Air Force One — remained parked on the tarmac at the West Palm Beach airport to avoid revealing the president’s movement.

About 9:45 p.m. Wednesday, the president boarded a nearly identical plane concealed in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base, taking off and landing under the cover of darkness, with cabin lights dimmed and window shutters drawn.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said plans for the visit had been in the works for weeks.

“It’s a dangerous area and he wants to support the troops,” Grisham told reporters before Trump landed. “He and Mrs. Trump recognize that there’s a lot of people who are away from their families during the holidays, and we thought it’d be a nice surprise.”

The president told the troops he was honored to spend part of his holiday with them.

“There is nowhere I’d rather celebrate this Thanksgiving than right here with the toughest, strongest, best and bravest warriors on the face of the earth,” Trump said.

___

Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Deb Riechmann in Washington contributed to this report.

Capitalism’s Failures Have Ignited Protests Worldwide

What follows is a conversation between journalist Ben Ehrenreich and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News, folks. This is Marc Steiner. Good to have you with us.

Bob Dylan wrote a song many moons ago, and one of the lines went something like this: “Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you?” And I won’t say the rest, but that song was called Ballad of a Thin Man. And we used to sing that song to the establishment back in the 60s when the world was being rocked by liberation movements and worldwide demonstrations. Now, from Colombia, to Hong Kong, to Haiti, Bolivia, Egypt, and Iran, and a dozen more countries, are exploding with demonstrations.

They’re not all erupting for the same reason, at least not the same obvious reason, but the underlying causes may be connected; from the failure of the neoliberal policies, to international finance rules that benefit the elite and the wealthy but leave the masses behind struggling in their wake, to capitalism’s inability to answer the social and then the economic needs of the people themselves. But given that, and how the right may support Hong Kong, but the left may decry the coup in Bolivia–though I might add this whole radical kind of supports both of them. But seriously, how do we connect those dots, understand what is going on in this planet and how these revolts may be confronting and defining the future for the 21st century. 

Ben Ehrenreich wrestles with this in his latest article for The Nation called Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism. And Ben, welcome. Good to have you with us.

BEN EHRENREICH: It’s good to be here, Marc.

MARC STEINER: And let me just add before we start that Ben’s most recent new book is The Way to the Spring, which is based on his reporting from the West Bank. And next July we’ll see his next book, Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap to the End of Time, which may be appropriate for this conversation. Maybe not.

Well Ben, good to have you here. But I think as you look first of all in a broader sense at these rebellions taking place across the globe–and we covered some of this when we covered Hong Kong. I had some people kind of writing on YouTube that they thought I was being too liberal in supporting and having these people–calling them socialists on the air, these people who were part of the Hong Kong demonstrations. And then other people getting upset because of the coup in Bolivia. And they seem really disparate in terms of their political underpinnings. But in some ways, all these things–from there, to Haiti, to the Sudan, to throughout the world–there’s a connection here that is really hard for most people to kind of put their hands around.

BEN EHRENREICH: Yeah. I think for a lot of them there is. And I’ve been grappling with this for a few weeks, as one after another country just sort of explodes into protest trying to figure out why this is happening now; what, if anything, they all have in common. Eventually, I just started making a list, and the list was long. I mean, as you said, it’s more than a dozen countries that are now in the last… since September have been thrown into turmoil by popular uprisings. Some of them started a lot earlier than that. Hong Kong did, and Haiti certainly did. And I started trying to make lists of what in each country set them off, and the commonalities quickly began to stand out. In most of them, whether it was a hike in a fuel tax or a hike in transit fare as in Chile that set them off, it was austerity policies of one kind or another that pushed people into the streets.

In other words, people are in all of these countries getting more and more squeezed, which means the daily life is harder. There is fewer and fewer social services available to them from the government and they see in pretty much all of these countries a corrupt, unaccountable elite, which is enriching itself while the lives of most people become more and more difficult.

And I think in most of these countries, this has been happening for some time. And there was some small spark like in Chile, the hike in transit fares that pushed a few people into the street and then many more people. And then of course governments tend to overreact to these things with considerable brutality. And that pushes even more people in the streets. And then within a few days you have a vast movement happening.

MARC STEINER: So I mean, when you look at these things… I mean, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about were these rebellions taking place, riots taking place, street demonstrations across the globe. To me, there’s a connection between that and the rise of the populist right. I’m not saying the populist right is behind the demonstrations at all. But the connection is, it seems to me–and I’d like to see what your thoughts on this–is the inability of this neoliberal capitalist world to answer the questions of people’s lives, so for people to survive. And I think that’s the connecting dots, but it’s being used politically across the spectrum and I think that’s what’s confusing people so much. How do you put your finger on it?

BEN EHRENREICH: Yeah. I mean, I think you’re right. I think in a lot of places, unfortunately the US being one of them, people have turned to nationalists and various kinds of ethnos chauvinist right-wing responses to some of the same challenges, right? That people are more and more shut out of their own societies. That people have a harder and harder time getting by. One case that was pretty interesting, I think, was France, which just marked it’s 12 month anniversary of the yellow vest protest, which of course were set off when Macron decided as a good green European centrist to try to discourage fossil fuel use by imposing a tax on fuel. Right? And he did this, everyone noticed, shortly after slashing taxes on the very rich.

So it was really clear that whatever transition was going to happen to agree in economy was going to happen on the backs of ordinary people. And this sent people out into the streets. Those protests were extremely tumultuous and have been long-lasting, and there’s been a lot of hair-pulling over what that means, I think among people on the left as well as the right… Because there have been far right elements, antisemitic elements out in those protests as well as folks on the left and the far left, and sometimes they’ve gotten along and sometimes they haven’t. But I think you’re right. I think the people on both sides of the spectrum are responding in different ways to increasing social insecurity.

MARC STEINER: Yeah. And it seems to me that one of the things you are wrestling with in your article which is really important I think for us to wrestle with in a much broader and deeper sense as well, is people can be so dismissive so quickly. What I was alluding to earlier was when I did a piece with socialist activists who were involved in the Hong Kong demonstrations, I get all these comments from YouTube saying, “You’re a tool of the Western governments. This is all being fomented by the United States deep state,” and all the rest. When no… for us to understand that these things were erupting because people have a deep discontent with their societies. And I think that it’s something that has not happened before like this, and people on the left especially are kind of grasping for how to define it and how to respond to it. I think that’s part of the dilemma most people are having. You haven’t seen very many articles like yours that are trying to connect the dots.

BEN EHRENREICH: Yeah, I don’t… The U.S. has been quite good historically at fomenting coups–

MARC STEINER: Absolutely.

BEN EHRENREICH: …At toppling governments in lots of different ways. What the U.S. has not been very good at is fomenting mass movements. Because for thousands and sometimes millions of people to come out day after day and risk their safety and risk their freedom, take something other than bribes from the U.S. Embassy… And so I have a hard time accepting that kind of analysis in a place like Hong Kong. I think that when there are mass protests like these and government’s reacting with extraordinary force, then no matter where you stand on the left, it is worth listening very carefully and not immediately assuming conspiracy intervention, et cetera, even if that is often the case in many countries around the world.

And from everything I’ve read and everything I understand about what’s happening in Hong Kong, Hong Kong is one of the most unequal cities in the world. It has some of the highest housing costs in the world, has some of the longest working hours in the world. So, in addition to the immediate demands of the protests in Hong Kong having to do with pulling the extradition bill, people are out there in the streets again and again, day after day because they are desperate, because their lives are completely out of their control. And I think one of the things that’s been really interesting, one of the commonalities: three of the places that have had these kinds of strongest and deepest protests have been Hong Kong, Chile and Lebanon; all countries with really long and deep histories of precisely this kind of neoliberal austerity and privatization. Of course, we know the history in Chile. There we did have a coup that the U.S. backed–

MARC STEINER: Absolutely.

BEN EHRENREICH: …And an experiment of several decades in neoliberalism backed by Pinochet’s death squads. And all of these are countries where not only have there been extreme forms of austerity and inequality, but in which space itself is more and more privatized. Beirut is just an incredibly privatized city. And from everything I’ve been reading about the protests there, one of the things that’s been most inspirational to people has been taking those spaces back and creating a kind of radical public that has not been able to exist there before. And I think that’s something anybody who’s spent time in the streets in protests knows that’s what happens. Radical forms of solidarity are built in the streets during protests. And I think these protest movements have been able to go much deeper in places where that kind of radical solidarity was so desperately needed.

MARC STEINER: If you look at some of these things that are happening–happening in Sudan, that are happening in Haiti and the Western European demonstrations–many of them are farmers who want to be able to use the chemicals they want on their land and don’t want to be told what to do. And that’s part of their push as well. And you have all the other ones we’ve talked about and the ones we have not talked about, India and Iran and other places. So when you look at this, just before we close, what I said in the last part of my opening is that in some ways these rebellions and demonstrations around the world could be defining what a struggle looks like in the 21st century for a new kind of world. So how do you begin to connect those dots? Where do you see the commonality and where do you see the contradictions?

BEN EHRENREICH: Really the contradictions are still quite large. And I think it’s pretty hard to convince a protestor in Ecuador or in Bolivia that they have a lot in common with a French or a Dutch farmer. But I think once you start looking beyond national boundaries, it becomes clear that in all of these places people are rebelling against the world that we live in now, which is one in which we have these absolutely corrupt and venal elites controlling society after society with really no challenges. I mean, in our own country–within the U.S. of course–we’ve had like two centrist parties battling it out for years and without any fundamental challenges to the momentum

that our society is going in, and this is true in many other places as well.

And I think the challenge looking forward–and this is made more and more acute by climate change, which of course does not respect orders–the challenge is going to be putting these struggles together and forming kinds of solidarity that are both uncomfortable and are new to us; that look beyond national borders to what we all have in common, what we need to do together if we’re going to make the kind of changes we need in our lives.

MARC STEINER: Well, Ben, there’s so much more I want to talk about with you. But we’ll do it over a period of time here and kind of look at this in some greater depth. Appreciate the piece you just wrote, Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism that appeared in The Nation, and the other work you’re writing. Ben, thank you so much for taking your time today and we’ll talk soon.

BEN EHRENREICH: Thanks so much, Marc. Would be a pleasure to come back.

MARC STEINER: My pleasure. And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thank you all for joining us. Please let us know what you think. We’ve got to get this dialogue going together. Take care.

America’s Darkest Secrets Are Laid Bare in ‘The Report’

While most Americans will never be able to see the full Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture committed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even the publicly available executive summary reveals shocking facts about the agency’s heinous acts. “The Report,” a new film by director Scott Z. Burns—whose work includes “The Bourne Ultimatum” and, more recently, “The Laundromat”—brings to life this dark chapter of recent American history with a cast that includes Annette Bening, Adam Driver and Jon Hamm.

In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Burns tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer about the inspiration behind the movie.

“The way in for me was an article that I read in Vanity Fair about the two psychologists who are generally given credit as being the architects of the program,” he says. “They had this idea that they could come up with a program that used, you know, what they called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’—what I think most people on the planet would call torture—[that] they sold to the CIA after 9/11, and said that they had the special sauce that would make people talk.

“My parents are both psychologists,” Burns continues, “so I grew up around people who practice. And the notion that psychologists would think that they should use their understanding of the human mind to hurt people was very confronting to me.”

Scheer, who recently interviewed Peter Honigsberg, author of “A Place Outside the Law: Forgotten Voices from Guantanamo,” points out one of the most tragic facts about CIA torture.

“I don’t think you can justify torture, even if it produces valuable evidence,” Scheer says. “That’s why it’s banned internationally in other documents. But the fact is, they didn’t produce any actionable information. And that makes it such an incredible scandal.”

Burns shares an incredible story—one he learned during his research but didn’t include in “The Report”—that puts the CIA’s actions into a powerful historical context.

“The best interrogator the Nazis had was a guy named Hanns Scharff,” he says. “And Scharff interviewed 500 airmen, and he basically used tea conversation, maybe a scotch; knowledge of, you know, American baseball. And he was successful in 480 out of 500 airmen who he interrogated. … So the Nazis’ best guy wouldn’t use these techniques, and yet this is immediately where the CIA took us to.”

There are only three full Senate Intelligence Committee reports in existence, after several copies were destroyed, a fact that indicates that the American public may never know the truth about what was carried out in its name. However, thanks to Burns’ film, which is in cinemas and will be available on Amazon, Scheer concludes that many may become more aware of the issue. Listen to Burns and Scheer discuss what the Truthdig editor in chief calls a “riveting” film about one of the defining issues of our time. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

—Introduction by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. And the irony of that word–I always saw this podcast as kind of the poor man’s CIA, you know; ”intelligence” in that sense. But we’re here to discuss a movie, and you are Scott Z. Burns–very famous director, writer–Bourne Ultimatum, Contagion, the great documentary on the Panama Papers, which I’m blocking on–

Scott Burns: Ah, the movie The Laundromat, which–it’s not a documentary, but it’s with Meryl Streep.

RS: Yeah, and it’s terrific. But I just want to say right at the outset, I went to see a prescreening of The Report. I expected not to like it; I’m not a big fan of Dianne Feinstein, I am a big fan of Annette Bening. And I thought, oh, this is going to give her too much credit, and also it’s a movie made for Amazon, what are they doing in the movie business, and so forth. And I, you know, worry about the size of Amazon and all of their connections and everything. I came out of that theater, one of those Hollywood screening rooms, and I thought: this is one of the best movies dealing with national security, war and peace, that I think I’ve ever seen. And I’ve spent a lot of time on this issue. I’ve read everything I can about the torture program, I’ve written about it extensively; I even have a book out on the surveillance society and so forth. And I learned a lot from The Report. And I’m a little confused at some of the response to it. It’s been mixed. And mixed only in terms of how theatrical it is.

First of all, I found it riveting. I found it incredible theater, OK. And I just wonder whether there’s resistance to really examining the U.S. as a sponsor of torture. And in your movie–I don’t want to put my own spin on it. But what I found was devastating was the clear assertion–and it’s clear in The Report, we’re talking about a 6,700-page report that most of us have never been able to read. But there was a heavily redacted 500-page executive summary. I read that carefully; I’ve covered this issue. And the devastating thing about this is that this torture–I don’t think you can justify torture, even if it produces valuable evidence. That’s why it’s banned internationally in other documents. But the fact is, they didn’t produce any actionable information. And that makes it such an incredible scandal. It was zealously produced by one administration, the George W. Bush administration, and then effectively covered up, in a sense, by the Barack Obama administration. So I want to turn it over to you to tell me how at this point in your career, when you’ve done all sorts of more action-oriented, you took on what seemed like a difficult subject, you know, and brought it to life.

SB: Well, I think the way in for me was an article that I read in Vanity Fair about the two psychologists who are generally given credit as being the architects of the program. And they were contractors; they were guys out in the world, they’d retired from the Air Force. And they had this idea that they could come up with a program that used, you know, what they called ”enhanced interrogation techniques”–what I think most people on the planet would call torture. And so they used that euphemism. And they sold this program to the CIA after 9/11, and said that they had the special sauce that would make people talk. And my parents are both psychologists, so I grew up around people who, you know, who practice. And the notion that psychologists would think that they should use their understanding of the human mind to hurt people was very confronting to me. And that sort of sparked my curiosity, and I started doing more research. Eventually I came across the report that Daniel Jones wrote for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and I read the 500-page executive summary, like you did. And I was aghast at what was done in our name. And I was also stunned by the fact that when I walked around in the world, there were people who were under the impression that these techniques work.

And so I began speaking to people in the FBI, people in military intelligence, people whose whole lives have been about interrogation. And every one of them that I spoke to said that not only is this illegal, but it is ineffective. And the conclusion of the report that Daniel J. Jones reached, you know, as the lead investigator, is that everything that we learned from using these techniques, we already had from other sources, from other governments, and that this was not, you know, a successful program. And the CIA in fact themselves, at the end, did an after action review, after six years of this. And their conclusion was that this wasn’t a successful program, and that in the future, they would talk to law enforcement in other countries about successful interrogation methods.

RS: Yeah, but this is not information that they feel that they can trust the American people, or in fact the world’s population, to know. Because in fact, the CIA had done its own study, pretty much came to this conclusion. The FBI was against the torture from day one, and some of the most effective interrogations were done by the FBI using totally opposite approach of befriending witnesses, getting their story, showing a little bit of understanding of their language and history and knowledge. And then these goons came in, and I–the two psychoanalysts that you’re talking about, and you changed their name in the film–

SB: No, we used their real names. Their names are changed in the report, they’re Swigert and Dunbar in the report.

RS: Yeah, I’m sorry, I misspoke. But the fact is, they represent the worst–they’re like a Dr. Strangelove of science. You know, how can we use our intelligence and knowledge about the human personality in the most destructive way. You know, science gone mad. And what I find most important about this movie, The Report–and it’s riveting on many levels. I really, unabashedly, really encourage people to see this movie, and I say it with full enthusiasm. But what I learned about it, the most important was the difficulty of a Senate Intelligence Committee which, after all, had been formed in the aftermath of the Senator Frank Church investigations of excess of our intelligence agencies and their abuse of power. So it was formed to keep these agencies within the Constitution, within standards of human decency. And finally, you know, a senator who hasn’t always been on the forefront of challenging government, Senator Dianne Feinstein, is the head of the committee; the Democrats happened to be a majority of the committee at that moment, and they conduct this investigation.

And it really raises–this movie, The Report–the most fundamental question in a democratic society: What right do we–and need do we–as the public have to know the bad, the good, and the ugly, you know? What need? And James Clapper, who was the big guru of intelligence, weighed in and said, you can’t release this report because the bad people around the world will do terrible things. And once again, the question is, is truth an asset to a free people in their education, or is it the enemy? And the government–and I must say Barack Obama collaborated on this. He came in as president, and he said, I’m not opening that wound. Well, you don’t open–that’s like, then why did we have the Nuremberg Trials? Why did we hold the Soviets accountable for their show trials? Why do we hold any ruler in the world, if you can’t examine it and learn the lessons from it? And so I think the power of this movie is really the difficulty of a Senate committee doing its job.

SB: Yeah. Look, I started out very much writing a movie about the program. But then, you’re right, as I learned sort of the odyssey that Daniel Jones went through trying to push this thing out, it became clear to me that what this story is really about is accountability. And does this, you know, does Congress really have the authority and the guts to hold the executive branch accountable. And I think we’re seeing that today. And it didn’t start with this program, but I think this is a really interesting sort of tracer bullet through a fundamental political problem that we’re having right now. Which is, you know, do we believe that the executive branch can perform unchecked by Congress. And as you pointed out, The Senate Intelligence Committee was created on the heels of the Church investigation to, in fact, provide oversight and accountability to the CIA. And the fact that the CIA resisted this, and continues to this day to refute the findings of this report, is really problematic.

You know, I mean, just on its face, you have to recognize that, you know, there were other countries who used techniques like the water board–and we, you know, we vilify them. And yeah, we did it and expect to, you know, proceed with impunity. And, you know, the Japanese used the waterboard in World War II, and we had trials for the people who did that, and we executed them. And the hypocrisy of that is really stunning to me. You know, and what you said before about the FBI and these other groups using rapport-building as really the technique to get information is true. And one of the stories I learned along the way–which didn’t make it into the film, unfortunately–the Nazis, the best interrogator the Nazis had was a guy named Hanns Scharff. And Scharff interviewed 500 airmen, and he basically used tea conversation, maybe a scotch; knowledge of, you know, American baseball. And he was successful in 480 out of 500 airmen who he interrogated. After the war, we actually hired Hanns Scharff to come and lecture in this country. And so the Nazis’ best guy wouldn’t use these techniques, and yet this is immediately where the CIA took us to.

RS: Well, it really goes to an important, I think, and dangerous drug within the American experience, and that’s the insistence on American innocence. We may do bad things, but they’re accidents, they’re mistakes. Whether it was, you know, genocidal attacks on Native Americans, or the existence of slavery and then segregation right up through World War II in the military, and so forth. There’s always this insistence on–well, Donald Trump said he’s going to make America great again, which would mean we were great when we had slavery and we were great when we did all that stuff. And then Hillary Clinton said, no, we’ve always been great. So there’s this requirement for that. And what it does is it destroys, I think, the main strength of our Constitution, which is the assumption that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that’s why we have a Constitution that is genius–with whatever contradictions of the founders being white men and everything. But the genius of our Constitution was that power corrupts, and you know, and that’s why you have to have division of powers and checks and balances. Here you have a perfect example of the check and balance. You have a Senate committee that, reluctantly and quite late, investigates–comes to this conclusion, and they came to this conclusion five years ago. And now thanks to your movie, we may have a chance of that report becoming part of public debate. If the movie is successful, if it generates the debate it deserves.

And I would just hold out another example of Hollywood. You had a movie, Zero Dark Thirty, which was well received, and it reflected CIA propaganda that torture was necessary to the capture and killing of Bin Laden. That’s–that’s as big a lie as you can tell. Torture was not a factor, and it has been conceded and so forth, yet we have probably the most important Hollywood product dealing with torture, is actually a movie that is based on a lie. And a lie put out by the CIA, which even violated–they always talk about national security. You can’t talk about this, you can’t–they actually had the director and the writer of that movie come to a closed CIA meeting where they identified the people who were on the raid to capture Bin Laden. You know, jeopardizing their lives. And they put out this false story. It is stunning. And Leon Panetta, who was a liberal democratic ex-congressman, was actually the head of the agency then.

So, you know, then I looked at your movie, and I thought my goodness, here is a very moderate centrist Democrat, Dianne Feinstein. And she looks into this and decides this is really quite reprehensible, particularly the CIA’s infiltrating their computer system and everything else. This is really what we’re most afraid of with secret agencies, right? Like the FBI that went after Martin Luther King. And here is this veteran senator, and they put tremendous pressure on her. And the fact is, we now basically still have to speculate about the report. We have the introduction. But we–ordinary citizens, journalists, filmmakers, or anyone else–are not allowed to read this report. It is a direct violation of one of the great U.S. contributions to international justice jurisprudence, which was the Nuremberg Trials. Where they said, the truth matters; setting the record matters. I mean, I don’t know–what am I missing here?

SB: Well, you know, to that point, after Daniel Jones left the committee, and after the Republicans–

RS: You should mention that he’s brilliantly portrayed.

SB: Yeah, Daniel Jones is played by Adam Driver in our movie, and Adam does an extraordinary job of kind of showing this Kafkaesque odyssey that Dan went on. Not only writing the report, but then trying to get this thing through the corridors of power and out into the world. And you know, when I was doing my research I spent a fair amount of time with Jane Mayer, who wrote a great book about this called The Dark Side. And you know, Jane said to me early on, Daniel Jones is an American hero. And you know, there are other heroes in this story. I mean, I met with Alberto Mora, who was at the Pentagon when this program happened. And recognize that this is a CIA program, not a DoD program, but the Pentagon seemed very willing to carry the CIA’s water on this one. And Alberto Mora got up and said, this is not what we do. We cannot torture people. This is against our laws. It’s against what this country is meant to be about.

RS: And John McCain, who had himself been tortured in a Vietnamese jail, was to his last day on this earth very clear about that.

SB: Yeah. The last conversation that Daniel Jones had with John McCain, before Sen. McCain died, was, you know, they ran into each other on the street in D.C. and Senator McCain said to Dan, ”We got to get the rest of the report out.” And it is chilling to me that, you know, after Dan leaves the committee and Senator Richard Burr is made the chairman, one of the first things that Senator Burr did was ask to have all the copies of the report that were at the executive branch returned. And destroyed. And so I think at this point, there really are only three full copies that we’re aware of, of the report, that remain. Which has a lot to do with why I wanted to make this film.

RS: Where are these three copies?

SB: One is in Barack Obama’s presidential library. I believe the other two are in Guantanamo and can be used by people, you know, as part of these military commissions. Which is also a part of this story. You know, the fact that we did these things means that justice can’t really be served, because we violated the law by torturing people. And you know, I think regardless of where you find yourself on the right and left spectrum, I think we would all like to believe that the people who hijacked those planes and were part of that should face justice. And I’ve spent a lot of time with people who, you know, who had family members they lost on 9/11, and they would like for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to face justice. And they are outraged that these things were done in their name, because that was cited as the reason for doing this.

RS: Yeah, and the reason to have trials, public trials, is for the population, the world population and the American population, to learn what is done, what is this all about, you know. And I just want to mention that, though–what I thought was a really scurrilous, irresponsible review in the New York Times. I mean, which–you know, instead of dealing with the issues in this movie, deals with camera angles or something. Or does the actor–you know, what I loved about the film, by the way, was its measured tone. This is not a sensationalist movie. This is an incredibly responsible, but riveting–I hasten to say, riveting movie, you know. And if I’m, you know, getting a little propagandistic here for the movie, it’s because I really think it’s an incredibly important document. I’m not, you know, I have no stake in it otherwise. I think it’s–I asked my 165 students to go see it this week, because it’s in the theaters; it will be available from Amazon, I gather, after Nov. 29, I guess, and people should get it. And the reason, I think, is because it’s an important teaching tool in addition to being riveting as a film. And I was really annoyed, in the New York Times–again, superficial review. I suppose, by the way, the L.A. Times, where I worked for many years, had a much more thoughtful review. But there’s a sentence, that it said there are flashbacks of abused al-Qaeda detainees. And that’s really interesting: “abused.” And this is, you know, people waterboarded 83 times. I mean, this is some of the most extreme torture that has been visited upon human beings. But the assumption that all the people in the flashbacks, or who were tortured, were actually in al-Qaeda, in a New York Times film review of this movie, makes the main mistake, the error that so much of the reporting about torture has been.

And there’s a very interesting book by a very distinguished law professor at the University of San Francisco law school, [Peter Jan] Honigsberg, that just came out; I did a podcast with him just a few days ago, and carefully read his book. And it’s about Guantanamo, the people who ended up after the rendition and everything being at Guantanamo. And of the, say, 760 or whatever it was people at Guantanamo, about 90% of them were judged to have no, or no significant, but generally no connection with al-Qaeda. So the torture that was visited on a lot of people was not of al-Qaeda detainees; they were people, many of whom were grabbed because the U.S. government offered $5,000 to $30,000 for anyone that the Pakistan or Afghan police or army could round up. You know, Taxi to the Dark Side, which was an excellent documentary, captured that. I think it was Gibney, was it? Yeah, Alex Gibney. And the fact of the matter is that most of the detainees at Guantanamo–and this fellow, this law professor interviewed 56 of them who had been released, you know. And included, by the way, about 20 who had been fighting Muslims in China, in one of the serious human rights violations of reeducation camps for millions of Muslims in China, right? These people were fighting against the Chinese Communist government, right–they ended up in Guantanamo.

SB: The report itself–and you know, we include this in the film–the findings of the report state that, according to the CIA, a quarter of the people who went through their interrogation program were guilty of nothing. That they were people who probably should have never been picked up. And one of the detainees that we portray in the movie is killed, and he’s killed before we learn if he has any affiliation with al-Qaeda. And so, you know, I don’t read reviews, so you know, I guess everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

RS: No, but the reason I bring it up is this is kind of a test of our seriousness of purpose, as journalists, as citizens, as whatever. This is not some minor event in American history. This is an indelible mark on what America has been all about. And it comes not at an earlier period of our history where you could say, oh–well, there’s slavery in the world, and there’s abuse, and male chauvinism, and contempt for natives and what have you. This comes at the height of our–it’s like the embarrassment of Donald Trump right now. I mean, we’re seeing an ugly side of America in a late stage of the American republic. And your film–and that’s why I bring up a review. If you will not deal with this film–and given that we will probably never see this report–this is like in the old Soviet Union. They’ll make it a non-event, there was never a report. If there are really only three physical copies, and you can’t get to see them, we’re talking about destroying history. Already we know the CIA–by the way, under the direction of the current head of the CIA, Gina Haspel, who was appointed by Donald Trump–destroyed the videos of interrogation. So here you have a movie–I don’t think anyone else is going to produce a commercial movie on this subject. It took courage. And I, again, my hat’s off to Amazon, for whatever reason willing to make such a movie, you know.

SB: Yeah. I mean, Amazon was–it was interesting, because we initially had this project at HBO. And for a variety of reasons, they decided they weren’t going to go forward with it, but they did something that never happens in Hollywood–they gave us back the project. And we were able to get the money to make the movie from Vice Media.

RS: Otherwise you would have been frozen in turnaround.

SB: Yeah. So they did give us relief on all of that, and gave us the movie back. And vice media put up the money to make the movie. So we made it independently. But to their credit, at Sundance–where the movie was very well received–they came to us and said they wanted to buy it, and they wanted to put it in theaters. And they wanted to put it on Prime, which to me was really meaningful. Because I do want there to be a theatrical experience of this movie; I want people to go and see this as part of a community, and have to get up and look at each other at the end of this movie, and think about what our country did in all of our names. But I also recognize that the way the theatrical experience has evolved, that not everybody lives in a community where they’re going to get to do this. And so, you know, I’m grateful that Amazon Prime can get this movie to places where otherwise a small independent film like ours wouldn’t go. And for that matter, I’m really great–I mean, we have Jon Hamm, we have Annette Bening, we have Michael C. Hall, Maura Tierney, Adam Driver, obviously. We have this incredible cast, Matthew Reese–for actors who all worked for scale, and all showed up and helped tell this story. And so that was a really gratifying experience. To go back to what you were saying–

RS: I’d like to nail that one down. You mean even your stars worked for scale?

SB: Yes.

RS: Well, that says–you know, it’s very easy to put down Hollywood, but that really is quite impressive.

SB: Yeah, no, I mean, it was–it was a really gratifying experience to put the script that I’d written in front of people and have them say, this is a really important story, and I need to help and be a part of it. And you know, put their own–I mean, obviously, these are people who get asked to do a lot of projects, and it was a wonderful experience to have them show up, and you know, and help me do this.

RS: Well, you know, I think this movie, and the subject–and regrettably, your movie is really the only way we have of coming to grips with this subject. Because we have bits and pieces of it; we most likely will be prevented from ever reading the report, which I think is a, you know, a scandal, a major scandal in itself. And the heavily redacted report. When I say the film has really important, serious content, I’m not trying to discourage people from going to see it. Because I think, you know, you obviously are one of the most skilled directors, writers, and so forth, and you’ve made great popular movies. And this is definitely an action-filled and, you know, emotional searing movie. And I think the acting, you know, done for scale–I didn’t even know that until we did this–is absolutely brilliant. You know, I must say there was another movie made before 9/11 called The Siege. And Denzel Washington played an FBI agent, and Annette Bening was in it also; she was, I believe, CIA. And that was before 9/11. But there’s been a terrorist attack, and they end up rounding up every Arab in Brooklyn. And I happened to play like a little bit role in it, as a journalist who was a commentator with Arianna Huffington. And, you know, is it right to round up every Arab in Brooklyn–

SB: And I’m willing to bet you worked for scale. [Laughs]

RS: I, yes, I’m sure. But anyway, in that movie–and it’s interesting. Again, before 9/11, Denzel Washington makes all these arguments that were consistent with the FBI’s position that torture does not work. Not only that it’s anti our values, but it is counterproductive. And I forget his name, the guy from Monk, Tony–is it–

SB: Tony Shalhoub.

RS: Tony Shalhoub. He is an Arab-speaking FBI agent, and it’s comparable to the person you mentioned before, Ali Soufan. So history repeated itself in reality, you know. And Ali Soufan, who was a translator, actually was involved with John Kiriakou in the capture of the first high-level al-Qaeda suspect. And they interviewed–he was interrogated, and the important information that they got out of this person was done by Ali Soufan. And these, what happened was, they didn’t get anything more from that particular captive. But the CIA spun the story, because once the torture stopped, he clammed up and he started lying. That’s one of the things that happens with torture, you get all these false accounts.

SB: Well, and long before anybody else said that, actually, Napoleon said that. He said that we need to stop doing this, because all you get is false information. The fascinating thing that happened at the CIA–which goes to your sort of, you know, your point about Dr. Strangelove, or a movie like Catch-22–is the CIA initially said that they needed the waterboard for the detainee you’re talking about, who was Abu Zubaydah, who was the first sort of high-value detainee we had. First of all, the CIA claimed that–

RS: That’s who I was talking about–

SB: Yeah, and the CIA claimed that Abu Zubaydah was three or four in the al-Qaeda hierarchy.

RS: Yeah, he wasn’t even in al-Qaeda.

SB: He wasn’t really even in al-Qaeda; he was associated with them, but he wasn’t part of their leadership structure. He did give Ali Soufan information about who had planned 9/11.

RS: Yeah, in Germany, for instance, they were able to break up a whole network because of the information they obtained by giving him cigarettes and talking to him. Yeah.

SB: And I spent a fair amount of time talking to Ali Soufan about his techniques when I was doing my research. The interesting thing that happened once the waterboard was employed was, you know, the psychologists who were contractors–who, I should say, were paid $80 million to do this work, which got us no intelligence–

RS: As well as their legal expenses when people sued them, yeah.

SB: Exactly. They were indemnified. They initially claimed they needed the waterboard because they felt Abu Zubaydah had information that he wasn’t giving us. And so they immediately start waterboarding him. Even people at the black site where that was done were writing back to the CIA saying this is horrible, I want to be transferred, this guy doesn’t know anything. And eventually they stop, and they say well, the waterboard was successful because now we know he doesn’t know anything. And it’s that sort of circular logic that kind of runs throughout, you know, this program and throughout the film.

RS: Well, the torturers can always claim that they have what you call the secret sauce. And what is disturbing is not only do they–first of all, they deny basic human values that the world has reluctantly come to accept, that you don’t do this, OK. And if you do it, then you provide everyone in the world with an excuse for doing this, you know. But in this specific case of what your movie’s about, not having the trials–because after all, once you use the torture, you contaminate all the evidence, and that then becomes the excuse for not having trials.

Now, we believe in having trials because we learn from them. It’s not just that the victims get some measure of justice, important as it may be, but we believe that the legal system brings clarity, understanding. Who are these people, why do they do this? How did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed go from being an engineering student at a Christian school in North Carolina, and seem to be a happy exchange student at one point, to becoming the mastermind of 9/11? How did these people get to Afghanistan, after all–15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia; you know, even the 20th, I think, was, who wasn’t on the planes. So you know, we have a 9/11 Commission Report which has a disclaimer in it, saying that the 9/11 Commission was not able to interview the key witnesses, or even the people who interviewed the key witnesses in Guantanamo or elsewhere, but could submit questions.

So the value of a trial was to actually try to figure out, how did this happen? Who are these people? You know, why do they hate us? Why did they do this? You know, we don’t have that. We don’t have that information. And if that information is in this report, you know–and let’s go over the figures here, what has been released. And this is the chilling thing at the end of your movie–you say as of now, we still don’t have this report, which is 6,700 pages. That, by the way, we paid for, we taxpayers; a five-year investigation, right?

SB: Initially, you know, there were tapes that the CIA made of these interrogations, and it was discovered that they had these tapes. And the CIA destroyed the tapes, actually, above the objections of the Bush White House. And that’s what triggered the study. So Daniel was tasked after the destruction of the tapes, and the whole–the tapes investigation and the larger investigation took him seven years. It comprised looking at 6.2 million documents. And all those documents, you’ve got to understand, those–those are the CIA’s own records. So Daniel wasn’t looking at, you know, at Red Cross or, you know, humanitarian aid groups’ accounts. These are the CIA’s own records, in real time, of their study. And there isn’t anything in there that concludes that it works. In fact, what you see in, you know, the 500-page summary is that this program never was effective, and that it was misrepresented to the American people. The 6,700-page version–which I obviously can’t see because it’s classified, you know. But Daniel will say it just gives more detail and more examples. The thing that pains him the most is there are things from those 6.2 million documents that didn’t make it into the 6,700-page version, that are very chilling and are lost to history. And I can tell you from having spent, you know, a little bit of time with him, that’s probably the thing that bothers him the most, is at some point there were things, you know, essentially that were left on the cutting-room floor that, you know, we’ll never know.

RS: You know, it’s interesting. We’re going to run out of time here, but I do want to nail something here. Right now, because democrats are all angry with Trump and want to impeach him, suddenly whistleblowers–when they’re blowing the whistle on Donald Trump–they are heroes now. Even if they’re still anonymous, and we don’t know who they are, but hey, you’re blowing the whistle on Trump–OK, you’re our guy, or you’re our woman. But with the case of torture, under two administrations, the whistleblowers have not been treated kindly. In the case of John Kiriakou, who was involved in the capture of the top al-Qaeda person, who sat with this person for 56 hours when he was severely injured, and then was involved, you know, in the transfer over to the FBI interrogator. His life was destroyed, he lost his benefits, and he served two years in jail because he dared to say, challenge the torture program. And so it’s very interesting. You have really a whistle–not a whistleblower, you have a truth-seeker at the center of your movie. Right?

SB: Yeah.

RS: And this truth-seeker is actually a rare bird. This is what I want to focus on now. You know, you come away from the movie thinking, thank God there was this guy. Right? What’s his name again?

SB: Daniel Jones.

RS: Daniel Jones, not a household name at all, even to me. All right. So here he is–and your film brings him to life–and he is a regular person, right? He’s not some, you know, hogging the spotlight. He goes about his work methodically, tries to follow the evidence, and so forth. And he’s subjected to harassment. They actually tried to get material to–

SB: Yeah, no, there was a criminal referral against Daniel, you know, where the CIA claimed he had hacked into their computers; it was not at all true. Eventually it was dismissed because the Justice Department could find no evidence that that was the case. But, you know, this is a guy who doesn’t have political ambitions. He was somebody who came out of school and wanted to serve his country. And he went and worked in counterintelligence for the FBI before coming to the Hill, and because he cared about, you know, the issue of our day, which at the time was our national security, and he’s given this task to tell the truth. And you know, it’s fascinating to me because we are living in this moment, and the other night Carl Bernstein came to see our film and spoke to me afterward. And we talked about, you know, how–

RS: Since I teach at a college, we have to mention Carl Bernstein of Watergate.

SB: Yeah. I mean, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward are the journalists who, you know, for The Washington Post uncovered Watergate. And there was a movie made about that called All the President’s Men, which was a major influence on me in choosing my camera angles, and how we told the story. And Carl, you know, pointed out that, you know, we really owe a debt to truth-tellers like Dan. He is not a whistleblower. He is–and I’m grateful to you for making the distinction–he is somebody whose job it was to go and find the truth. That was it. It was not go and find the truth for the Democrats, it wasn’t go and find the truth for the Republicans. It was go and find the truth of this program. And that’s what he did.

RS: Well, you know, it’s interesting, though. He’s also unusual, because maybe we put careerism before everything else, convenience and so forth. And when you’re watching your movie–The Report, by the way. I don’t want to lose sight that we’re here, and I’m unabashedly promoting this movie. And you can get it on Amazon, which I happen to think is a good thing, even though a lot of filmmakers wonder about, you know, their art and everything. But, you know, hey, right now you’re listening to this, you stop listening, you go online, and you can watch this movie. And you can decide whether the director and this guy Scheer were wrong or not, whether it’s a good movie. And what, you won’t have made a big investment of money or time. So there is something great about the fact that hundreds of millions of people can watch this movie. I think it’s irresponsible for anyone who cares about what’s going on in the world, you know, if they don’t watch this movie. I really think that, and I think it’s interesting that, you know, you don’t want to talk about critical reviews and so forth, and you’ve gotten a lot of good reviews. But the negative–or not the negative, the nitpicking–is, oh, it’s not as dramatic as it should be, it’s not as–oh, OK. Bashing people against the wall, waterboarding them 83 times, you know, torturing the innocent people–oh, that’s not dramatic–oh. In fact, it gets an R rating, and I couldn’t tell whether the New York Times was being sarcastic or not. I wrote it down. It said, “For nauseating abuse and disgusting cover-ups.” I swear, at the bottom of the review that I printed out, it said “Rated R for nauseating abuse and disgusting cover-ups. OK, now you say you don’t read reviews, but I read the review. And I thought, wait a minute. “Nauseating abuse”–that means nauseating abuse by the United States government on the highest level. Disgusting cover-ups. And why would that get an R rating, that we want to protect children from that? And I don’t know, is that a–have you ever heard that before?

SB: No, no, I haven’t.

RS: But it has an R rating for other reasons, right? It’s violent, or–

SB: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think children should see this movie. It does have a fair amount of violence in it. I mean, not a lot. You know, the torture scenes that you’re talking about–and not that I feel like as a director, I get to defend my work; my work is out there, you can see it. But Alberto Mora, you know, who I mentioned previously, when I interviewed him he said, are you going to show torture in your film? And I said to him, I wasn’t sure–that it made me uncomfortable as a director, as a filmmaker, or as an artist to do that. And he said, but if you don’t show it, aren’t you perpetuating the original sin here by the CIA? You have the power, because you have a camera, to provide visual evidence of what was done. That’s what they took away from us when they destroyed the tape, because they know the power of the image. And as a filmmaker, I recognize that as well, and that is why I made that choice. And I hope that when people see the movie, you know, that they understand that that’s why that had to happen. And by the way, these scenes are actually more about the torturers than the torture itself. That was what I was trying to get at. And you know, honestly, I don’t think there’s more than a minute or two, at the most, of those scenes; probably closer to a minute in the entire two-hour movie.

RS: I think–I don’t know about how we define children, but I think young people should watch this movie. Because, you know, when they’re a certain age, they go into the military. They fight in these wars, these forever wars, and so forth. And they do so out of, often, a misguided sense of virtue of why they’re sent. But I do want to end on a point that I think is absolutely critical. The argument for trying to suppress–well, for suppressing the report–let’s cut to the chase: the report has been suppressed, OK. The video of the torture is a critical part of the record of the United States at this point in our history of what we did to human beings–and indeed, what did they say. Because after all, we have not answered the basic question of where did al-Qaeda come from. So there are lots of conspiracy theories and so forth; you feed conspiracy theories–I guess in the sense of unfounded theories, you know; not all conspiracies turned out to be unfounded. But you feed this kind of fake news, if you like, by not having a clear narrative.

And the main document we have about why these people did this stuff–we don’t have trials, we don’t have independent investigations–would be what they told their interrogators. As I said, the 9/11 Commission Report, the 9/11 Commission was picked by George W. Bush on the approval of democrat and republican leaders in Congress. These people all had high-level security, their staff had high-level security. And there is a disclaimer in the 9/11 Commission Report that says that this whole narrative is based on what we were told by people who interrogated the witnesses.

So let’s end this by saying, go see this movie. The fact of the matter is, this is as close as you will get to finding out, who were these people, and what part of the story were we allowed to see? And get a sense of what has been kept from us. And were it not for–I think, I’ll even say a heroic, and certainly persistent and talented director here that I’ve been talking to, Scott C. Burns, and actors who work for scale–we wouldn’t even have this. And so look at the report, and then tell me there aren’t a lot of unanswered questions about what this was all about.

I want to thank you for coming in, and for doing this. I want to thank the people here at NPR West, who provided the studio, and KCRW, Christopher Ho and the others for hosting this program. Our producer for Scheer Intelligence is Joshua Scheer, who found you and insisted we do this–I want to give him full credit, and he said you cannot avoid doing this, so I went and saw the movie, and I’m thrilled that I did. And we’ll see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

SB: Thank you.

Ralph Nader: Trump Should Be Impeached for His Climate Policy Alone

It is time to take Donald Trump’s disregard for climate crisis seriously. As Commander in Chief, Trump is abdicating his duties to protect his people, instead actively aiding and abetting the corporate polluters who are causing the climate chaos. Trump is wasting irreplaceable time that we need to prevent a worsening climate crisis. Trump’s actions, expanding the fossil fuel industry’s emissions, make the perils even worse. This is another reason for impeachment—climate crisis jeopardizes the American people in major ways.

Trump denies the overwhelming scientific warnings about the devastating destruction of the global climate crisis. He calls climate disruption a “Chinese hoax,” taking his delusionary persona to loony, dangerous levels.

The world is experiencing unheard of environmental upheaval: unprecedented heat waves, rapidly melting glaciers and permafrost, record floods, intensifying hurricanes, more frequent and severe droughts, and massive habitat convulsions. Despite the clear warning signs the worse is yet to come, Trump is shredding regulatory standards designed by law to curb the emission of greenhouse gases by fossil fuels, such as coal. He is opening large areas to oil and gas production, including those on our federal lands, the Arctic wildlife refuge, and offshore.

Trump has also decided to weaken Obama-era emission standards, a move that even upset some auto companies. Ford, Volkswagen, Honda and BMW all supported the stricter regulations set by California over those proposed by the Trump administration. Cutting back on energy efficient technologies releases more greenhouse gases, reduces gas mileage efficiency, and accelerates climate chaos.

It is as if Trump reacts to massive spreading wildfires by denying their causes, then doing nothing to diminish them. To make matters worse, it is as if he actively lowers environmental regulatory standards that would have played a role in preventing these fires.

The Pentagon keeps warning Trump and his cohorts that the climate crisis is a national security danger. Draft-dodger Trump can be charged with weakening our national defenses up against the destructive power of a perturbed nature.

Sea levels are rising. City planners at Miami Beach have an evacuation plan for tidal flooding, not just for exposed homeowners, but for the city itself.

Almost every week, the press, even Fox News, reports record-breaking natural disasters around the world. Just this last week, the Washington Post graphically reported changes in climate that have “set off a devastating chain reaction in the Sea of Okhotsk.” The giant eye-witness article is called “Weakening ‘the heart of the North Pacific.’” The melting ice and the warming sea have resulted in far fewer salmon (salmon catch is down by 70 percent since 2004). The New York Times recently published a page one feature on accelerating heavy rains and destructive droughts that wreak havoc on India’s agriculture and destabilize both urban and rural life. Another issue facing both India and Pakistan is the fast melting glaciers in the high mountains that feed the life-critical down-stream rivers below that sustain a billion people.

Leading scientists, led by climatologists, are putting out regular reports, rooted in evidence on the ground, which keep shortening the time before certain irreversible benchmarks, as with warming temperatures, are experienced.

None of this enters the cranium of the oblivious Donald J. Trump. He is too busy tweeting, scheming and slandering to further his own interests. Our nation’s interests are, to put it mildly, not his primary concern. He remains bent on pulling out of the voluntary Paris Climate Accord by the deadline next year. He is making America last again, behind over  196 nations who have signed the agreement to cut their carbon dioxide and other climate-disrupting gasses to keep the temperatures from rising to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Trumpland is where desired ignorance replaces presidential intellect, where reckless disregard of mounting property losses and human casualties become photo opportunities for alighting from Air Force One. Trump makes vague promises of aid only to then provide far less than what the devastated communities desperately need.

Translated into constitutional terms, Mr. Trump is deliberately refusing to enforce the laws mandated by Congress for environmental and workplace protection. He has given our government over to corporations, putting in charge corrupt corporatists qualified only to dismantle and disable these health and safety agencies. His crony capitalists are pushing out the scientists and crushing the civil servants who have sworn to uphold the law.

In making our country more defenseless against a mankind-driven upending of nature’s equilibrium, he gravely violates his oath to promote the general welfare and provide for the common defense. In a deepening emergency, he is stealing crucial years away from critical preparedness, as his own generals would tell him. Instead, he continues to mouth his insane phrase “beautiful clean, coal,” a mineral that once burned becomes one of the most deadly contributors to climate catastrophes.

Children are marching in the millions all over the world demanding that national leaders and big corporations in the fossil fuel industry move toward renewable, efficient energy with the utmost speed. These youngsters, who are doing their homework, are frightened over what will batter them in the coming decades. Trump should feel ashamed by their desperate pleas.

Our founding fathers often spoke of thinking ahead and respecting “posterity.” The desire to foresee and forestall was especially paramount for Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, not to mention the prescient Thomas Paine. For them and their colleagues, Trump would have been seen as a monarchical nightmare or and an impeachable offender on the climate crisis alone.

Pete Buttigieg Panned for Ad Attacking Free College

The Democratic presidential campaign of South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Thursday launched a new ad in Iowa attacking the idea of tuition-free public college, sparking backlash from progressives who called Buttigieg’s argument against the proposal “disingenuous” and reactionary.

“I believe we should move to make college affordable for everybody. There are some voices saying, ‘Well that doesn’t count unless you go even further, unless it’s free even for the kids of millionaires,'” Buttigieg says in the 30-second spot, a clear shot at Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who are both campaigning on making public colleges and universities tuition-free.

“But I only want to make promises that we can keep,” Buttigieg says in the ad, which aired Thursday evening in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Look, what I’m proposing is plenty bold. I mean these are big ideas. We can gather the majority to drive those big ideas through without turning off half the country before we even get into office.”

New Pete ad in Iowa taking aim at Warren and Bernie over college affordability/debt (but not by name), arguing they’d alienate half the country by insisting it be “free even for the kids of millionaires”. H/t @McCormickJohn

pic.twitter.com/SEAcOdHcAq

— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) November 29, 2019

Progressives were quick to respond that Buttigieg’s argument against tuition-free public college and in favor of means-testing could just as easily apply to other publicly funded goods and programs like K-12 education, Social Security, Medicare, and libraries.

“This logic leads directly to President Pete agreeing to further Medicare and Social Security means testing in order to keep taxes low,” said Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler.

Other critics echoed Beutler:

this is such a disingenuous attack that can be used for literally any universal program https://t.co/57UOj3SY0v

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) November 29, 2019

Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, said “to have an advanced society that lifts the working class, you need universal benefits paid for through progressive taxation.”

“Why does Pete dislike Social Security, Medicare, public parks, libraries, fire stations, etc.?” Shakir added.

Current Affairs editor Sparky Abraham, the author of an April article that addressed common attacks on free public college, also slammed Buttigieg’s new ad.

“This is a nonsensical and dishonest line for a lot of reasons, but especially notice what the result is: burdens land on poor people to prove they’re poor, and colleges don’t lose market share or profit to public competitors,” said Abraham. “This is pure profit protection at your expense.”

In a series of tweets late Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called Buttigieg’s attack on tuition-free public college “a GOP talking point used to dismantle public systems” and said “it’s sad to see a Dem candidate adopt it.”

“Universal public systems are designed to benefit EVERYBODY! Everyone contributes and everyone enjoys. We don’t ban the rich from public schools, firefighters, or libraries because they are public goods,” said the New York Democrat. “Universal systems that benefit everyone are stronger because everyone’s invested!”

Trump in Afghanistan for Surprise Thanksgiving Visit

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — The Latest on President Donald Trump’s first visit to Afghanistan (all times local):

11:50 p.m.

President Donald Trump is thanking U.S. troops in Afghanistan during a surprise visit to Bagram Air Field in his first trip to the site of America’s longest war.

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He says he flew 8,331 miles to be there to tell them the U.S. has never been stronger. He says, “There is nowhere I’d rather celebrate Thanksgiving.”

Trump spoke to a crowd of about 1,500 troops gathered in a hangar on the base. He stood behind a podium surrounded by army green sandbags and flanked by military equipment.

Trump at one point invited Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to join him onstage. Ghani wished the troops a “Happy Thanksgiving” and commended Trump for his leadership.

Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians and more than 2,400 American service members have been killed since America’s longest war began 18 years ago.

___

11:40 p.m.

President Donald Trump had a Thanksgiving meal with U.S. troops at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, where he traveled secretly Thursday.

Trump’s first stop was a dining hall decked out in paper Thanksgiving decorations where he plated turkey for the troops at the largest U.S. base in the country.

He was then greeted by a round of loud cheers as he headed into a main dining area and sat down for a meal, chatted and posed for photos.

He also thanked the troops and joked that, “It’s a long flight, but we love it.”

The meal included turkey, ham, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and candied yams. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, Entertainment Tonight and a Harry Potter movie played on dining hall TVs.

___

11:30 p.m.

President Donald Trump is making a surprise visit to Afghanistan to spend time with U.S. troops on Thanksgiving.

Trump arrived at Bagram Air Field shortly after 8:30 p.m. local time and spent more than two-and-a-half hours on the ground. Reporters were under strict instructions to keep the trip a secret to ensure his safety.

The visit comes more than two months after Trump abruptly broke off peace talks with the Taliban after a bombing in Kabul killed 12 people, including an American soldier.

And it comes at a pivotal moment in Trump’s presidency, with the impeachment inquiry moving quickly.

The president and first lady made a similar trip last year to Iraq on Christmas night — their first to an active conflict zone.

Vice President Mike Pence also visited troops in Iraq this week.

___

11 p.m.

The White House went to great lengths to keep the president’s surprise Thanksgiving trip to Afghanistan secret after his cover was blown last year.

Cell phones were confiscated from everyone traveling aboard Air Force One to Bagram Air Field. And Thanksgiving-themed tweets were teed up to publish ahead of time from the president’s account to prevent suspicions arising about his silence.

The president first flew back to the Washington area secretly from Florida, where reporters had been told he’d be spending Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, the plane he’d flown to Florida remained parked on the tarmac at West Palm Beach Airport to avoid revealing the president’s movement.

Last year, Air Force One was spotted en route to Iraq by an amateur British flight watcher.