George Packer's Blog, page 197

Who Bombed the Istanbul Airport?

When ISIS fighters killed a hundred and thirty people in Paris, in November, the group’s leaders in Syria took credit for the attack the next morning. When ISIS zealots murdered thirty-two in Brussels, in March, the group claimed responsibility the same day. After the attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando, ISIS’s leaders took credit for both, even though they appeared to play little or no role in helping to plan or carry them out.

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The Arrivals Hall at Atatürk Airport
The Security Firm That Employed the Orlando Shooter Protects American Nuclear Facilities
Former Ambassador Robert Ford on the State Department Mutiny on Syria

Marine Le Pen Prepares for a “Frexit”

On Thursday evening, Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s far-right National Front, gathered with Party leaders at a fish-and-chips restaurant in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris, in a kitschy salute to what they believed would be a continuance of their shared destiny with the British. Around 1 A.M., when some of the group was still out revelling, the polls began to suggest the real possibility of a Brexit. The Party leaders scrambled to assemble a response. “The British people have given not only to Europeans but to people around the entire world a shattering lesson in democracy,” Le Pen, surprised but triumphant, told reporters the next morning. “A new Europe will emerge,” she said. “For all patriots, for anyone who loves liberty, today is a day of joy. It is not that Europe is dead but that the European Union is teetering, and the nations are being reborn.”

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Sunderland and the Brexit Tragedy
Brexit, Seen from the Top of Europe
What Brexit Means for British Food

Sunderland and the Brexit Tragedy

In 1986, as a young reporter just out of the Columbia Journalism School, I went to Sunderland, an old and proud but depressed shipbuilding city on the River Wear, in northeast England, to report on an effort to get jobless people back to work. From the train station, I asked a cab driver to take me to the shipyards, which peaked in the nineteenth century, when they provided many of the sailing vessels and, later, iron-hulled steamers that serviced the far-flung British Empire.

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Marine Le Pen Prepares for a “Frexit”
Brexit, Seen from the Top of Europe
What Brexit Means for British Food

The Fallacy of Job Insecurity

Hardly any idea about the United States economy is as entrenched as the one about how old-fashioned, long-term jobs have disappeared. No longer can the new college graduate step into his wingtips and expect to wear them out by climbing the career ladder at one solid company, or at a steadily growing small business.

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LinkedIn and the Modern Worker’s Wandering Eye
Campaign Trade Wars
China’s New Age of Economic Anxiety

The Power of Pell Grants for Prisoners

Jackson, draped in a clean white T-shirt that rests atop oversized gray pants, slides his chair forward toward his desk. His goatee is well-trimmed, perfectly drawn across his upper lip and around his chin. He is full of jokes—before class, after class, and sometimes even during class. When he laughs, he flings his head backward, letting the bellow of his own wit rumble from his diaphragm. His thick-framed black glasses slide down to the edge of his nose as he pores over excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Although a jester, full of quips, he is also deeply focussed. He is bent over the book, his eyes a few inches from the page. He looks away only to give a quick glance at his notepad, insuring that his pencil is accurately reflecting his ideas and his synthesis of the text. Jackson, whose name I have changed to protect his identity, has been in prison since he was sixteen. He is twenty-five now, and says that receiving an education is the only thing that has kept him going. “I feel pride when I carry this notebook around,” he says.

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The Limits of “Grit”
Teaching Anti-Extremism in Kenya
The Rehabilitation Paradox

The Politics of the Benghazi Report

The release, on Tuesday, of the proposed report by the House Select Committee investigating the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, was, if nothing else, a reminder that people in Washington pay a lot of attention to who their political enemies are. It is too much to say that they make good or practical use of this knowledge. This investigation, led by Republicans, wasn’t the first thorough, and politically charged, congressional investigation into the attacks—this one makes it eight, and, at a cost of seven million dollars, it is the most expensive yet. The goal of finding out what happened in Benghazi has long been subsumed by the task of producing an indictment of Hillary Clinton, whose Presidential aspirations are its real target. That task is not any better realized in the eight hundred pages of the proposed report (which still has to be approved by the full committee) than it was before, which may be a source of frustration to Republicans. It is a small sign of the political pique involved that, earlier this month, the committee issued a statement with the title “#DishonestDems can’t keep their misleading claims straight,” in which it took issue with the Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings’s comment that the committee had been at it for three years—even though the Democratic committee members’ own Web site said that it had been at it for seven hundred and sixty-four days. “As anyone with a calculator can easily determine, that’s only two years and 34 days,” the committee noted. Case closed. The report it took that time to produce is similarly marked by a petty triumphalism that, for all the Republicans’ talk of the heroism of the four Americans who died in Benghazi, does not honor their memory. (The sister of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was one of those casualties, made this point in an interview with Robin Wright.)

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Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, June 29th
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A Perilous Nationalism at Brexit

Argentina’s Culture of Corruption

Fittingly, perhaps, for the inhabitants of a large country, the Argentines do not do things by half-measures. When its Presidents are corrupt, they tend to be brazenly so. “Descarados” is the apt Spanish term; Britons of a certain age would have called them “bounders.” The most descarado of Argentina’s bounders, in modern times, was probably Carlos Saúl Menem, who ran the country, from 1989 to 1999, with a shamelessness that brings to mind Silvio Berlusconi. When a businessman gave him a brand-new red Ferrari as a present while he was in office, for example, Menem drove it proudly around the city. When he was questioned about it, Menem exclaimed, “It’s mine, mine, mine!”

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Scenes from the Copa América Championship
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A Good Week for Vulture Funds

Brexit, Seen from the Top of Europe

The news of the Brexit vote—for all that it had been obviously plausible for years, highly possible for months, and even on the very eve was known to be at best a hairbreadth business—still shocked Europe, and perhaps the world, as no political event has since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The momentum toward pluralism, openness, the eradication of borders, and transnational consciousness, however hesitating or troubled its evolution, had been the civilizational momentum of our era. Suddenly, it seemed to stop. It was as if the moon had been called off, the tides pulled back in mid-flow.

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What Brexit Means for British Food
A Perilous Nationalism at Brexit
Why Brexit Might Not Happen at All

Chris Stevens’s Family: Don’t Blame Hillary Clinton for Benghazi

On Tuesday, the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is controlled by a Republican majority, charged the Obama Administration with diplomatic miscalculations, security failures, and a lengthy delay in rescue efforts, which contributed to the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, after an attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. Initially, the State Department believed that the attack was inspired by an anti-Muslim video. The Committee’s eight-hundred page report, which wraps up a two-year, seven-million-dollar investigation, specifically reprimanded the State Department, then under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; the Pentagon, headed at the time by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta; and the C.I.A.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Brexit, Seen from the Top of Europe
What Brexit Means for British Food
The Far Right’s Plans for the G.O.P. Convention

The Far Right’s Plans for the G.O.P. Convention

On Sunday, while video of a few dozen skinheads and white nationalists brawling with “anti-Fascist” protesters in Sacramento was cycling on CNN, Matthew Heimbach was watching his comrades online from his home, in Indiana. The white nationalists represented a California chapter of the Traditionalist Worker Party, a small, extreme right-wing group that Heimbach founded last year. At twenty-five, he is an entrepreneurial zealot who has tried to bring skinheads and racial theorists together in a spirit that he calls “boots and suits.” The Southern Poverty Law Center calls him “this generation’s David Duke.” In the California melee, at least seven people were stabbed; nine were hospitalized. Afterward, Heimbach told me his members were defending themselves against opponents. “More of them ended up going to the hospital than us,” he said, adding, “but it really is tragic that that had to happen in the first place.”

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Related:
How Real Is the New Far Right?
Book ’Em: California Firebombs
Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That