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blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years ago

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The Desert Fox: Separating the myth and the man of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

Sweat saves blood, blood saves lives, and brains saves both.

- Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

War hero or Nazi villain? Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is, to this day, the subject of heated debate. He was the “Desert Fox,” revered by Allied Forces for his supposed chivalry, and allegedly implicated in the “Valkyrie” plot to assassinate Hitler.

But present day historians have increasingly come to re-examine the life and the legend of this most iconic of World War Two generals.

I first became interested in this question after reading Corelli Barnett’s magisterial account ‘The Desert Generals’ back when I was in Sandhurst. I read other World War Two books before then of course but it was only at Sandhurst did I first give serious consideration towards Rommel as ‘the Good German’ general. I read other books too like General Sir David Fraser’s ‘Knight’s Cross: a life of Field Marshal Rommel’ as a stand out one on military stuff but a very cursory examination of his early life and beliefs.

Rommel was a legend in the making.

Whichever side of the debate one falls on there is no doubt that Erwin Rommel, was one of the most celebrated and respected generals of the Second World War and indeed, some even say one of the greatest generals of all time. His prowess on the battlefield earned him more than a battlefield earned him the admiration of both his men and his enemies alike, with adversaries lining up to pay tribute to their greatest foe in the field.

“We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general,” said no less than Winston Churchill himself of Rommel, just after the war ended in his book on the conflict, The Second World War.

When Churchill came under fire in the press for praising a man seen as a Nazi, he doubled down, commenting “He also deserves our respect because, although a loyal German soldier, he came to hate Hitler and all his works, and took part in the conspiracy to rescue Germany by displacing the maniac and tyrant.

For this, Rommel paid the forfeit of his life. In the sombre wars of modern democracy, chivalry finds no place… Still, I do not regret or retract the tribute I paid to Rommel, unfashionable though it was judged.”

Indeed, the extent to which Rommel was a Nazi is one of the great questions that has been asked since the war and one that is debated to this day. Rommel, while respected by those who fought him from afar as generals and indeed, thought of a genius to many of those who fought beneath him in the Wehrmacht, has often faced criticism of his tactics and his decision making, with some post-war writers holding him up as a man prone to erratic behaviour on the battlefield and a great sufferer from the stresses of the job.

“Rommel was jumpy, wanted to do everything at once, then lost interest. Rommel was my superior in command in Normandy. I cannot say Rommel wasn’t a good general. When successful, he was good; during reverses, he became depressed,” said Sepp Dietrich, who fought under Rommel in France and ended the war as the most senior figure in the Waffen-SS.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Luftwaffe field marshal Albert Kesselring, a contemporary of Rommel’s and an officer of similar rank, who later wrote: “He was the best leader of fast-moving troops but only up to army level. Above that level it was too much for him. Rommel was given too much responsibility. He was a good commander for a corps of army but he was too moody, too changeable. One moment he would be enthusiastic, next moment depressed.”

Who was this great man then? We know him today as a great tactician, a charismatic leader, a respected general and the last German participant in the so-called “clean war”. But how true are those assessments? Was the Desert Fox as chivalrous as his enemies thought him to be?

Rommel was far from just a Second World War hero – he distinguished himself in World War One too.

Rommel graduated from the military academy in Gdansk – then known as Danzig and an integral part of Germany – in 1912 and was immediately posted back to his home region of Baden-Württemberg.

When war broke out in 1914, Rommel was ready to face his first major conflict posting. As a battery commander within the 124th division of the German army, he would distinguish himself and gain his first recognition from the higher-ups.

Erwin saw his first action at the age of 23 on August 22, 1914, near the French town of Verdun. Rommel led his platoon into a French garrison, catching them by surprise and personally leading the charge ahead of the rest of his men, earning credits for bravery and ingenuity. He would be awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, for his actions, a promotion to First Lieutenant and a transfer into the Royal Württemberg Mounted Battalion as a company – rather than platoon – commander.

Rommel would go on to fight in the German campaigns in Italy and Romania, with particular note being taken by the German Army hierarchy of his conduct in the Italian campaign. The Royal Württemberg Mounted Battalion fought at the Battle of Caporetto, the twelfth battle to be fought along the Isonzo River in modern-day Slovenia, and one that would go down as probably the largest military defeat in the history of Italy.

Rommel would play a central role, leading the Royal Württemberg, with just 150 men, to capture an estimated 9,000 Italians, complete with all their guns, for a cost of just 6 of his own men.

The young Rommel used the challenging, mountainous terrain of Caporetto – now known as Kobarid – to outflank the Italians and convince them that they were totally encircled by Germans, when in fact there was just one battalion. Fearing that they were surrounded, the Italians surrendered en masse and were surprised to find that so few men were able to capture them.

The efforts of the German Army to break into the Italian Front through the Slovenian Alps – at the time, part of Italy – were vital in furthering an advance towards Venice, though the Germans were eventually stopped and turned back.

Rommel was awarded the Pour Le Merite award by the Kaiser for his leadership at Caporetto, but also gained the respect and loyalty of his men, who were not only impressed by the way in which his tactics had won the battle, but also by the way that he had stood up to the German Army high command and argued for more and better food for his men. The legend of Rommel was growing apace.

Rommel was an effective teacher as well as a military leader.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that Rommel was a capable teacher: his father had been a headmaster, while the ability to communicate his ideas effectively in the field would lead to some of his most enduring military victories. There was no point coming up with a revolutionary tactic to win a battle if you couldn’t then inform and inspire your men well enough for them to then go and carry it out.

At the end of the First World War, Rommel was entering his late 20s and had already been widely feted for his military prowess. While it might have seemed a little dull compared to the derring-do on the Isonzo, the role of the Royal Württenberg Mountain Battalion lay much closer to home, with German society slowly disintegrating into civil wars between, on the left, socialists who wanted Germany to undergo a revolution similar to that which had recently occurred in Russia, and on the right, groups such as the Freikorps, disgruntled ex-soldiers and nationalist, anti-communist paramilitaries that would go on to form the kernel of the Nazi Party.

Rommel, recently promoted again to the rank of Captain, was ordered to use his soldiers in a policing capacity, putting down insurrections all over southern Germany. It was during this period that he showed some of the sense of restraint that would distinguish his conduct in North Africa during World War Two, trying to avoid the use of force against crowds of civilians where possible.

After the Weimar Republic took hold, however, the country somewhat stabilised and Rommel found himself in Dresden, teaching new recruits. He had been promoted in turn to Major, then Lieutenant Colonel, placing him in the very highest echelons of the Treaty of Versailles-reduced German Army.

He was recognised as one of the prime instructors in that army and wrote a book, “Infantry Attacks”, that furthered his theories on warfare and explained his experiences in the Izonzo – it sold incredibly well and increased Rommel’s personal fame, as well as bringing him to the attention of Adolf Hitler, who was known to have read the book.

Rommel met Hitler in Goslar, Germany in 1934, while Rommel was posted as battalion commander. Hitler’s charisma and promises to reestablish Germany as a world power after the crippling results of World War I inspired Rommel to become a fervent supporter of the Nazi Party.

The two men had several encounters following this, and Rommel rose through the ranks on Hitler’s personal recommendation. But it was ultimately Hitler’s liking for Rommel’s book Infantry Attacks that led to his becoming the commander of Hitler’s personal guards during his tour of the Sudetenland.

By the 1930s with Hitler fully secured in power, the German Army, for whom Rommel worked, and the Nazi state were more and more inseparable. It would be this coming together that prompted a major dilemma for the career soldiers such as Rommel: did the duty lie to their country, and whoever might be governing it, or to the party, that was coming to define what that country was about?

Rommel was a committed Nazi and not the “decent face” of the German Army.

Rommel’s antagonism wasn’t so much against Nazism as it was towards the Nazis in leadership who led it. His committment to Nazism eroded as the war took a wrong turn and as Hitler increasingly became erratic in his military decision making that Rommel grew increasingly frustrated.

Just how much of a Nazi Rommel was is one of the biggest questions that is debated about him to this day. It is largely due to the Rommel myth that was perpetuated by the likes of Winston Churchill after the war that Rommel was taken by the victorious Allies as “the good Nazi”, or the honest general who happened to be being ordered about by the Nazis, merely a career soldier who followed orders and stayed out of politics.

Let’s put that one to bed, here and now. Rommel was an early adopter of the Nazi Party and a committed believer in the ideals of National Socialism, while also being an officer who regularly disobeyed orders – making both commonly held assumptions wrong.

That said, he is one of the few figures of that period who is still revered in Germany, who still has streets named after him and memorials in his honour. It seems that the myth persists in his homeland too, despite countless books and articles to the contrary.

One such author attempting to shake this idea from the public consciousness is Wolfgang Proske, a historian and history professor from Rommel’s hometown on Heidenheim, who has written 16 books about his town’s most famous son. “Rommel was a deeply convinced Nazi and, contrary to popular opinion, he was also an anti-Semite. It is not only the Germans who have fallen into the trap of believing that Rommel was chivalrous. The British have been convinced by these stories as well,” he told British newspaper The Independent in 2011 when a new memorial to the Field Marshal was unveiled.

“At the time when Rommel marched into Tripoli, more than a quarter of the city’s population were Jews,” Proske continued, “There is evidence which shows that Rommel forbad his troops to buy anything from Jewish traders. Later on, he used the Jews as slave laborers. Some of them were even used as so-called ‘mine dogs’ who were ordered to walk over minefields ahead of his advancing troops.”

While Rommel was never a member of the Nazi Party, it is widely known that Wehrmacht figures, particularly high-ranking ones such as Rommel, welcomed Hitler coming to power. Those, like Rommel, whose backgrounds had shut them off from the highest ranks of the Kaiser’s forces, saw the new government as one that would see them move to the top of the tree and as such were generally in favor of it.

Goebbels himself wrote in 1942, when Rommel was in the running for the role of Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, that the Field Marshal was ”ideologically sound, is not just sympathetic to the National Socialists. He is a National Socialist; he is a troop leader with a gift for improvisation, personally courageous and extraordinarily inventive. These are the kinds of soldiers we need.”

Rommel owes a large part of his fame to the fact that he made fools of opposing general - well almost (Patton would disagree).

Rommel’s prowess as a general is unquestioned. On the back of his heroics as a low-level officer in World War One added to by his role teaching at the forefront of modern military tactics, he was perfectly positioned to lead the Nazi war machine into the second conflict.

When the war began, he was leading Hitler’s personal protection battalion – so much for a man who kept a distance from the center of Nazi power – and thus was privy to the highest levels of discussions regarding tactics, particularly the way in which to use mechanized infantry such as tanks. After the early successes in Poland, Rommel moved with the front to France and commanded Panzer units, before distinguishing himself against the British at Arras and leading the drive towards Dunkirk.

With the British regrouping on the other side of the Channel after a crushing defeat – which, lest we forget, Dunkirk was – the focus turned to North Africa, where Rommel would lead the newly-established Afrika Korps. He was the superstar of the German Army, a reputation largely built on his ability to vanquish the British, whom he would now face again in the desert. It was at this time that his nickname, The Desert Fox, was coined by the British press, who sought to create a figure against which the war could be fought.

The legacy of Rommel as the acceptable Nazi could be seen to stem from this point when the media in Britain saw fit to create a worthy adversary for their troops to combat. Rommel was thought to be an old-style soldier rather than an out-and-out Nazi: though we have seen that he was a Nazi, and he had arguably committed war crimes by summarily executing prisoners in France just weeks before.

Come the victory of the British at Tobruk and El Alamein, the British propaganda machine had even more than a noble adversary. They had a noble adversary against whom they had lost in Europe and then subsequently defeated: when the characters of the British side, Auchinleck and Montgomery, were spoken of, they needed someone of equal weight to make their victories seem even more heroic, a role that fit Rommel perfectly.

With morale at home low after the Dunkirk evacuation, the victories in North Africa were vital to keeping spirits up, and a glorious victory against an equally glorious enemy sounded even better. Churchill himself called Rommel an “extraordinary bold and clever opponent” and a “great field commander” in the House of Commons in 1942 – after he had just been defeated.

Rommel’s reputation for chivalry in North Africa might not just be down to his own intentions.

Of course, some aspects the Allied propaganda about Rommel – that he was a fair fighter, that he respected the ideals of chivalry when other Germans didn’t – were generally true.

It is undoubted that, by and large, Rommel adhered to the rules of war when plenty of Nazi generals didn’t, but it bears mentioning that the reason that so many German generals were so callous is that they were ordered to be like that. Orders within the Nazi war machine came down from high and were often brutal in their nature: summary execution of prisoners, rounding up of Jews and other minorities, scorched earth policies. That was just the orders aimed at enemies: often generals would be ordered to stand their ground to the death when all military logic told them to make a tactical retreat.

Rommel’s dedication to upholding the “war without hate” as he called the more traditional methods of war is up for debate, but certainly, he did take measure to negate the harsher aspects. That said, there are other factors that question whether his commitment to the “war without hate” was intentional, circumstantial or ideologically-driven.

When most German generals were likely to commit acts of ethnic cleansing, Rommel was not generally faced with the question. North Africa, where this reputation was developed, had hardly any Jews, for example, and other potential targets for Nazi aggression were protected by being citizens of Italy and Rommel was wary of standing on the toes of their allies. That said, many within the North African Jewish community are reported as having felt that they were spared from the horrors suffered by Jews in Europe by the actions of the Afrika Korps, led by Rommel.

It is also widely accepted that he refused to execute captured Jewish prisoners and hated the use of slave labour. As far as his own troops were concerned, Rommel repeatedly refused orders directly from Hitler. When, at the end of the second Battle of El Alamein, Hitler commanded him directly not to retreat and to show his soldiers “no other road than that to victory or death.”

Knowing that it was impossible for him to defeat the advancing British, who massively outnumbered his forces, Rommel chose to ignore the letter from the Fuhrer and fled all the way across North Africa to Tunisia rather than face death in the sand. While he was way too politically powerful to be censured by Hitler, actions such as this were contributory to a wider feeling among the Nazi hierarchy that Rommel was not one of them.

He was a PR superstar in Germany, but was both respected and later suspected by the Nazi leadership.

Rommel’s reputation within Germany might well have made him untouchable for the Nazi hierarchy, even when he did things that were in direct contradiction of the ideological and military strategy of the regime. They had invested so much time and so much weight in making him the poster boy of their propaganda regime that, when Rommel turned out to be less than what they had hoped for, they could not easily dispose of him.

On paper, he was the perfect fit for their media machine: he was an early adopter of Nazism, already a hero from the First World War and an excellent general, with victories aplenty. Moreover, they could cite the Allies reverence for him in their favor, and Rommel himself was comfortable in the spotlight and relished the attention.

Hitler was always wary of building up any one single figure too far – lest he be challenged himself – but Goebbels, the chief propagandist, knew an opportunity when he saw it and Rommel could not be passed up. As Rommel’s media image grew and grew, he became the darling of the public back home, but in the corridors of power in Berlin, there were plenty of higher-ups who were less convinced of his powers.

Even from the early days of the war in 1941, when Rommel was in France, some of those who fought alongside him were doubting just how effective he actually was a general. By the time that the war in North Africa had turned against him in 1943, the German furthest expansions were contracting: the Battle of Stalingrad had been lost in February and Rommel departed Tunisia in May.

It might have made sense if the Nazis had thought Rommel their best general, to send him to the Eastern Front where the war was being lost. Perhaps, too, the brutal nature of the war on the Ostfront was seen as beyond Rommel’s nature: this was not the time or place for “war without hate”, in the eyes of the Nazi leadership.

Instead, he was dispatched to Italy. As Italy fell, Rommel was demoted from the head of the campaign to second in command to Albert Kesselring, alongside whom he had served throughout the North Africa campaigns.

Later in France, Rommel was the man in charge of building the Atlantic Wall that would protect Nazi-occupied France from Allied invasion: though he had warned heavily that his experiences in North Africa had taught him that land and sea defences would be nothing if air supremacy allowed the Allies to destroy the Nazi army from above, Rommel was ignored.

After the defeat in North Africa, the retreat through Greece and Italy and the failure to stop the D-Day invasions, his reputation as a superstar general back home was in tatters.

Rommel’s reputation got a huge boost because of a 1951 film.

If Rommel’s reputation as a great leader was undermined by the catastrophic defeats on the African, Italian and Western Fronts in the last two years of the war, why was it that the so-called “Rommel Myth” was so pervasive after the war? The theories are numerous, but one major contributing factor must be the success of the 1951 film, The Desert Fox. Rommel was played by the iconic actor James Mason who won critical acclaim for his role.

Rommel was a well-known figure in Allied countries and in 1950, the first biography of the “good German” was released in the UK. Written by Desmond Young, a British brigadier-general who had himself been captured by Rommel during the war, “Rommel: The Desert Fox” was incredibly popular in Britain and cemented the position of the vanquished general as the acceptable enemy.

His later involvement in the 1944 plot against Hitler did a lot to wash Rommel of the stain of Nazism – conveniently forgetting the decade or so that he had spent close to the top of the regime – and his position as the general who was beaten “fair and square” endeared him to a British audience. After all, it’s much easier to build heroes of your own generals when they have beaten a general that you also respect.

The 1951 film of The Desert Fox further spread the myth and was widely popular in the UK. The narrative of Rommel, the good German, being defeated by the heroic British in the clean war in North Africa was a far more palatable one in the burgeoning Cold War than one that emphasised the horrible destruction that had come through the Soviet victory in the East.

There could be little appetite for a war with Russia when people were constantly being reminded of the horrific images that had emerged from the Eastern Front. Thus, the clean general of the fair fight in North Africa was an enticing idea.

The Germans, too, were all too pleased to go along with Rommel as their figurehead. Their army had been severely curtailed after their defeat, but there was a clamour to de-Nazify the Wehrmacht and remove the stigma from the German armed forces. The Bundeswehr, the new German army, was more palatable to a post-war world when it could be seen as the legacy of good soldiers lead by bad politicians rather than an integral and vital part of the Nazi war machine.

Thus, the idea of The Desert Fox was created and, to a large extent, still persists. He remains the only Nazi to be lionised within Germany: public squares and streets bear his name, as does the largest barracks of the Bundeswehr. Whether such a status is deserved, however, is still a question about which historians continue to argue.

During the first half of 2020 many countries have been reconsidering the roles of their historical figures - remembered in statue form - due to their controversial views or actions from today’s point of view. In Britain, France and Belgium, statues of figures associated with the colonial past have become the target of public criticism in some quarters. In the United States, not only statues of Confederate figures who defended slavery during the American Civil War were destroyed or even demolished, but also, for example, the discoverer of America, Christopher Columbus.

In Germany a similar process was also underway. The monument to the Wehrmacht Marshal Erwin Rommel in Heidenheim came under severe renewed scrutiny.

Germany's memorial to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is perched on a hillside overlooking the middle-class town of Heidenheim an der Brenz where he was born 120 years ago. The words inscribed on the white limestone monument describe the legendary Second World War general as "chivalrous", "brave" and as a "victim of tyranny"

The monument, which was built in 1961 by the German Afrikakorps Association, aroused long-term controversy and in the past was repeatedly damaged by inscriptions that called Rommel a Nazi. In 2014, Heidenheim City Hall expressed its intention to contrast the monument with another memorial building. By 2020 those calls took on a greater momentum.

The German artist Rainer Jooss was brought in by the municipal authorities to re-interpret the existing monument without having to destroy it completely. Jooss took as his starting point to focus on other parts of Rommel’s legacy. It was little known that Rommel had large minefields laid during the campaign of German troops in North Africa during World War II. In Libya and Tunisia alone, at least 3,300 people have lost their legs and another 7,500 have been maimed since the statistics were kept in the 1980s. So Jooss designed black silhouette cut out of a maimed child victim of war to complement the monument.

“The monument does not represent the truth, but encourages us to look for it,” said Bernhard Ilg, Mayor of Baden-Württemberg, at the presentation of the monument’s design unveiling in July 2020. Jooss was more stoic. Joos believed it would be a mistake to remove the Rommel monument altogether,"If we let grass grow over it, that would mean the end of the important task of dealing with history.”

The artist behind the modification to the Heidenheim monument said his statue was purposefully made to look small next to the impressive limestone bloc."I wanted to confront the monumental (features) of the original memorial with the fragility of a land mine victim.” Jooss wanted and hoped that it was up to “the next generations to make a picture of themselves based on factual histography.”

Yet eminent historians have since dismissed the fresh silhouette plaque as a transparent attempt to avoid addressing the deep seated questions about Rommel. Indeed Rommel’s privileged position to being seen as the ideal role model for the Bundeswehr (the unified armed forces of Germany and their civil administration and procurement authorities). While recognising his great talents as a commander, they point out several problems: such as Rommel's involvement with a criminal regime and his political naivete. However, there are also many supporters of the continued commemoration of Rommel by the Bundeswehr, and there remains military buildings and streets named after him and portraits of him displayed.

The politician scientist Ralph Rotte called for his replacement with Manfred von Richthofen. Historian Cornelia Hecht opined that whatever judgement history will pass on Rommel – who was the idol of World War II as well as the integration figure of the post-war Republic – it was now the time in which the Bundeswehr should rely on its own history and tradition, and not any Wehrmacht commander. Jürgen Heiducoff, a retired Bundeswehr officer, had written that the maintenance of the Rommel barracks' names and the definition of Rommel as a German resistance fighter are capitulation before neo-Nazi tendencies. Heiducoff agreed with Bundeswehr generals that Rommel was one of the greatest strategists and tacticians, both in theory and practice, and a victim of contemporary jealous colleagues, but argued that such a talent for aggressive, destructive warfare was not a suitable model for the Bundeswehr, a primarily defensive army. Heiducoff criticised those Bundeswehr generals for pressuring the Federal Ministry of Defence into making decisions in favour of the man who they openly admire.

Rommel has had his supporters from this avalanche of revisionist criticism. Historian Michael Wolffsohn supported the Ministry of Defense's decision to continue recognition of Rommel, although he thought the focus should be put on the later stage of Rommel's life, when he began thinking more seriously about war and politics, and broke with the regime. Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) reported that, "Wolffsohn declares the Bundeswehr wants to have politically thoughtful, responsible officers from the beginning, thus a tradition of 'swashbuckler' and 'humane rogue' is not intended".

According to authors like Ulrich vom Hagen and Sandra Mass though, the Bundeswehr (as well as NATO) deliberately endorses the ideas of chivalrous warfare and apolitical soldiering associated with Rommel. At a German Ministry conference soliciting input on the matter, Dutch general Ton van Loon advised the German Ministry that, although there can be historical abuses hidden under the guise of military tradition, tradition is still essential for the esprit de corps, and part of that tradition should be the leadership and achievements of Rommel. Historian Christian Hartmann opined that not only Rommel's legacy was worthy of tradition but the Bundeswehr "urgently needs to become more Rommel".

There are other historians who have tried to take a middle path on the continued controversy of Rommel’s legacy. Historian Johannes Hürter believed that instead of being the symbol for an alternative Germany, Rommel should be the symbol for the willingness of the military elites to become instrumentalised by the Nazi authorities. As for whether he can be treated as a military role model, Hürter writes that each soldier can decide on that matter for themselves. Historian Ernst Piper argued that it was totally conceivable that the Resistance saw Rommel as someone with whom they could build a new Germany. According to Piper though, Rommel was a loyal national socialist without crime rather than a democrat, thus unsuitable to hold a central place among role models, although he should be integrated as a major military leader.

Whether one is for and against Rommel such debates take place because he is dead in conveniently ambiguous circumstances.

Recovering from skull fractures in hospital, he missed the main event - the 20 July Bomb Plot 1944 - insitigated by other senior German army officers. Hitler survived the blast, and immediately set about executing the plotters.

While Rommel had lots of contact with many key conspirators and was generally aware of the movement(s) to assassinate Hitler, there is no direct evidence that he knew about the July 20th plot in advance, let alone was involved in any detailed planning. Several conspirators allegedly confessed during interrogation that he was involved and, like Speer, his name was found on Goerdeler’s list of possible participants in a new German government.

Rommel was listed among various possibilities for Reich President. Unfortunately for him, there was no question mark or other notation, as in Speer’s case, which indicated that he was unaware of the designation.

He maintained his innocence when confronted by General Burgdorff on the day he died and also told his wife and son that he had played no part in the events of July 20th. But ultimately, there’s no way to know what he was or was not aware of. He took that with him to the grave.

The list of members of the 20 July plot doesn´t name Rommel as part of the attempt to kill Adolf Hitler. But: Rommel was blamed of having known of plans to do so. So he was forced to commit suicide.

On 19 th October 1944 Rommel met two german generals at his home. They showed him pretended evidence about his paticipation in “operation valkyrie”, which he denied to be true. They accompanied him away from his home, where he swallowed a capsule filled with potassium cyanide and died. The two generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Maisel , members of german court of military honour, who had handed over the capsule to Rommel, drove back to his home and contended that Rommel had died because of ramifications of an injury he received on 17th of July during an allied bombardement.

Given a choice between a trial, involving his disgrace, execution and his family’s impoverishment - and suicide - he chose the latter.

The story given to the public was that he’d died of wounds sustained in the air attack. He was named a “german hero”, was “honoured” with a state funeral an d buried in Herrlingen, Germany.

Had he lived who knows what his real fate might have been at the hands of the Allies. At the main Nuremberg trials, the two army generals prosecuted were Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and General Alfred Jodl. Both were accused of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. Both were convicted on all four charges and hanged.

The principal charge against Keitel was the infamous 13 May 1941 Barbarossa Decree, which condemned captured prisoners and ensured a high level of brutality by German soldiers against Soviet civilians. Jodl was the author of the Commando decree – ordering that any Allied commandos encountered in Europe and Africa should be killed immediately without trial, even if in proper uniforms or if they attempted to surrender.

General Heinz Guderian is an example of a prominent German general who did survive the war but was not prosecuted for war crimes.

Another prominent example is Field Marshall Kesselring, who had commanded the defence of Italy after the Allies invaded. Kesselring was not prosecuted at Nuremburg, but did face a British military court in Italy. The Moscow declaration of October 1943 had stated that those accused of war crimes would be prosecuted in the country where they had committed their crimes. Although the trial was conducted in Italy, Italian judges did not participate as Italy was not considered an ally. Kesselring was prosecuted for the shooting of hundreds of Italian prisoners in retaliation for attacks on German soldiers. Kesselring was found guilty and condemned to death. British General Alexander, who had run the Italian campaign, and Winston Churchill pleaded for the sentence to be commuted - which it was. Kesselring was released in 1952 and lived until 1970.

By comparison Rommel was never accused of issuing similar decrees. Many felt that he was an honourable soldier. Nor was he ever accused of shooting prisoners in the way Kesselring was. Rommel’s military reputation is that of a highly professional soldier who carried out his duties according to a military code of ethics. His record is untainted by atrocities or unsavoury tactics against the enemy or civilian populations. He tended to live a charmed life early in the war.

Had he lived one can only speculate as to his fate and his legacy. Speculation regarding a possible role for him in the rebuilding of German forces for NATO, had he survived, is unrealistic. Rommel was never a strategically-minded commander. Indeed it is well known that Quartermasters hated him for his habit of outrunning his supplies on the battlefield.

The likelihood is he might well have been allowed to live without any kind of Allied retribution for war crimes as he was never guilty of any such departures from a strict military code of behaviour. But in trial - he would surely would have been put on trial even if he would be found not guilty - the messy details of his involvement with the Nazi regime would come to light. It would show that Rommel certainly benefited from the regime he served, and I think would have been considered guilty by association, even if his enthusiasm for Hitler waned in his final days.

Post-war, it would not have surprised me at all if the Allies had sought to build a West German government around Rommel. Staunchly anti-Communist, he nevertheless was seen widely as honourable and pro-West. But what role he would have been given - or what role the allies might have been able to make palatable to a war ravaged population - can only be speculated.

I suspect he would have served in some official capacity within the Bundeswehr before retiring to write his highly expected memoirs. It’s telling that Rommel’s chief of staff, Hans Speidel, drove the creation of the Bundeswehr and was the first to be named a generaloberst in that force. Later he was Supreme Commander of all NATO ground forces in Central Europe (which was almost all of it). It’s an intriguiing thought what Rommel might have played in a post-war Cold War Germany and Europe. Speidel and Rommel were inseparable and cut from the same bolt of cloth. Indeed it was Hans Speidel, who had been involved in the July 20 plot, wrote after the war that Rommel was a member of the resistance, (for which there is no evidence) that contributed towards Rommel and ‘The Good German’ Myth.

Given all that was “overlooked” by both the Allies and the German people after World War Two. There’s no logical reason to think that Rommel would not have been as honoured, if not more so, after the war. After all, one of the main Bundeswehr barracks continues to be named after him in 1965.

To me he was a great general rightly lauded by his peers and military historians - but not the best. Rommel was a highly competent tactical commander, but there were many such commanders in the Wehrmacht. His prominence is due to a number of things. Firstly, he was always Hitler favourite; secondly Goebbels played him up in his propaganda; and thirdly he fought the British and Americans and thus received much more attention in the Western press and historians after the War than the German commanders fighting the Soviets.

Indeed an argument can be made that by fighting in the Western Desert in a sector that the British had logistical and material superiority (and thus difficult to defeat), Rommel essentially taught the British and the Americans Blitzkrieg tactics - essentially modern warfare. His very inflated legacy saved the British from admitting their military performance in North Africa was abysmal until the Axis forces overextended their supply lines and the American supply of goods was able to compensate for substandard British equipment.

It’s also forgotten that Rommel also oversaw the building of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall which was essentially a fiction when he took over. Immense resources were poured into the project. The impact was to delay the Anglo-Americn invasion about 5 hours and only on one beach (Omaha).

And no matter how humane and honourable he was, Rommel was ultimately a weak man who chose to look away when it was convenient to his career to do so. Indeed I agree with many historians today that he was primarily bent on serving Hitler to advance his career. He was a man who believed he was serving a king and realises too late that he was a devil. I have little doubt that he was conflicted by that especially as it grew during the seven months of his life leading up to his death. Perhaps the best tactical military manoeuvre he made was to take the poison forced upon him and thereby save his family but also secure his legacy, even if that legacy remains mostly intact if a little more tarnished to this day.

#rommel #nazism #nazi #german history #war #second world war #battle #soldier #general #erwin rommel #allies #germany #afrikacorps #statues #culture #society #history #military #military history

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mattkennard · 5 years ago

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How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper

Published: Daily Maverick (10 October 2019) w/ Mark Curtis

The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state’, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.

The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.

Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by both agencies.

According to minutes of meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.

“This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the [committee] before publishing the first tranche of information,” state minutes of a 7 November 2013 meeting at the MOD.

The DSMA Committee, more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by the MOD, where it meets every six months. A small number of journalists are also invited to sit on the committee. Its stated purpose is to “prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations”. It can issue “notices” to the media to encourage them not to publish certain information.

The committee is currently chaired by the MOD’s director-general of security policy Dominic Wilson, who was previously director of security and intelligence in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who describes himself as an “accomplished, senior ex-military commander with extensive experience of operational level leadership”.

The D-Notice system describes itself as voluntary, placing no obligations on the media to comply with any notice issued. This means there should have been no need for the Guardian to consult the MOD before publishing the Snowden documents.

Yet committee minutes note the secretary saying: “The Guardian was obliged to seek … advice under the terms of the DA notice code.” The minutes add: “This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it.”

‘Considerable efforts’

These “considerable efforts” included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would “jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel”. It was marked “private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media”.

Clearly the committee did not want its issuing of the notice to be publicised, and it was nearly successful. Only the right-wing blog Guido Fawkes made it public.

At the time, according to the committee minutes, the “intelligence agencies in particular had continued to ask for more advisories [i.e. D-Notices] to be sent out”. Such D-Notices were clearly seen by the intelligence services not so much as a tool to advise the media but rather a way to threaten it not to publish further Snowden revelations.

One night, amidst the first Snowden stories being published, the D-Notice Committee’s then-secretary Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance personally called Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian. Vallance “made clear his concern that The Guardian had failed to consult him in advance before telling the world”, according to a Guardian journalist who interviewed Rusbridger.

Later in the year, Prime Minister David Cameron again used the D-Notice system as a threat to the media.

“I don’t want to have to use injunctions or D-Notices or the other tougher measures,” he said in a statement to MPs. “I think it’s much better to appeal to newspapers’ sense of social responsibility. But if they don’t demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act.”

The threats worked. The Press Gazette reported at the time that “The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] … and the Telegraph published only a short”. It continued by noting that only The Independent “followed up the substantive allegations”. It added, “The BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story.”

The Guardian, however, remained uncowed.

According to the committee minutes, the fact The Guardian would not stop publishing “undoubtedly raised questions in some minds about the system’s future usefulness”. If the D-Notice system could not prevent The Guardian publishing GCHQ’s most sensitive secrets, what was it good for?

It was time to rein in The Guardian and make sure this never happened again.

GCHQ and laptops

The security services ratcheted up their “considerable efforts” to deal with the exposures.

On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials entered The Guardian’s offices at King’s Cross in London, six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been published.

At the request of the government and security services, Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent three hours destroying the laptops containing the Snowden documents.

The Guardian staffers, according to one of the newspaper’s reporters, brought “angle-grinders, dremels – drills with revolving bits – and masks”. The reporter added, “The spy agency provided one piece of hi-tech equipment, a ‘degausser’, which destroys magnetic fields and erases data.”

Johnson claims that the destruction of the computers was “purely a symbolic act”, adding that “the government and GCHQ knew, because we had told them, that the material had been taken to the US to be shared with the New York Times. The reporting would go on. The episode hadn’t changed anything.”

Yet the episode did change something. As the D-Notice Committee minutes for November 2013 outlined: “Towards the end of July [as the computers were being destroyed], The Guardian had begun to seek and accept D-Notice advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details and since then the dialogue [with the committee] had been reasonable and improving.”

The British security services had carried out more than a “symbolic act”. It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies.

The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair noted that after GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper’s laptops “engagement … with The Guardian had continued to strengthen”.

Moreover, he added, there were now “regular dialogues between the secretary and deputy secretaries and Guardian journalists”. Rusbridger later testified to the Home Affairs Committee that Air Vice-Marshal Vallance of the D-Notice committee and himself “collaborated” in the aftermath of the Snowden affair and that Vallance had even “been at The Guardian offices to talk to all our reporters”.

But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this, noting that “the process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice Committee] member”.

At some point in 2013 or early 2014, Johnson – the same deputy editor who had smashed up his newspaper’s computers under the watchful gaze of British intelligence agents – was approached to take up a seat on the committee. Johnson attended his first meeting in May 2014 and was to remain on it until October 2018.

The Guardian’s deputy editor went directly from the corporation’s basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing.

A new editor

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish some of the Snowden revelations but agreed to Johnson taking a seat on the D-Notice Committee as a tactical sop to the security services. Throughout his tenure, The Guardian continued to publish some stories critical of the security services.

But in March 2015, the situation changed when the Guardian appointed a new editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing with the security services. Viner had started out on fashion and entertainment magazine Cosmopolitan and had no history in national security reporting. According to insiders, she showed much less leadership during the Snowden affair than Janine Gibson in the US (Gibson was another candidate to be Rusbridger’s successor).

Viner was then editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, which was launched just two weeks before the first Snowden revelations were published. Australia and New Zealand comprise two-fifths of the so-called “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance exposed by Snowden.

This was an opportunity for the security services. It appears that their seduction began the following year.

In November 2016, The Guardian published an unprecedented “exclusive” with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service. The article noted that this was the “first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service’s 107-year history”. It was co-written by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice Committee. This was not mentioned in the article.

The MI5 chief was given copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an “increasingly aggressive” Russia. Johnson and his co-author noted, “Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the Snowden files.”

Parker told the two reporters, “We recognise that in a changing world we have to change too. We have a responsibility to talk about our work and explain it.”

Four months after the MI5 interview, in March 2017, the Guardian published another unprecedented “exclusive”, this time with Alex Younger, the sitting chief of MI6, Britain’s external intelligence agency. This exclusive was awarded by the Secret Intelligence Service to The Guardian’s investigations editor, Nick Hopkins, who had been appointed 14 months previously.

The interview was the first Younger had given to a national newspaper and was again softball. Titled “MI6 returns to ‘tapping up’ in an effort to recruit black and Asian officers”, it focused almost entirely on the intelligence service’s stated desire to recruit from ethnic minority communities.

“Simply, we have to attract the best of modern Britain,” Younger told Hopkins. “Every community from every part of Britain should feel they have what it takes, no matter what their background or status.”

Just two weeks before the interview with MI6’s chief was published, The Guardian itself reported on the high court stating that it would “hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to charge MI6’s former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004”.

None of this featured in The Guardian article, which did, however, cover discussions of whether the James Bond actor Daniel Craig would qualify for the intelligence service. “He would not get into MI6,” Younger told Hopkins.

More recently, in August 2019, The Guardian was awarded yet another exclusive, this time with Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer. This was Basu’s “first major interview since taking up his post” the previous year and resulted in a three-part series of articles, one of which was entitled “Met police examine Vladimir Putin’s role in Salisbury attack”.

The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these “exclusives” as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden’s. They were possibly acting to prevent any revelations of this kind happening again.

What, if any, private conversations have taken place between Viner and the security services during her tenure as editor are not known. But in 2018, when Paul Johnson eventually left the D-Notice Committee, its chair, the MOD’s Dominic Wilson, praised Johnson who, he said, had been “instrumental in re-establishing links with The Guardian”.

Decline in critical reporting

Amidst these spoon-fed intelligence exclusives, Viner also oversaw the breakup of The Guardian’s celebrated investigative team, whose muck-racking journalists were told to apply for other jobs outside of investigations.

One well-placed source told the Press Gazette at the time that journalists on the investigations team “have not felt backed by senior editors over the last year”, and that “some also feel the company has become more risk-averse in the same period”.

In the period since Snowden, The Guardian has lost many of its top investigative reporters who had covered national security issues, notably Shiv Malik, Nick Davies, David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Cobain. The few journalists who were replaced were succeeded by less experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the security state. The current defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh, started at The Guardian as head of media and technology and has no history of covering national security.

“It seems they’ve got rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security services and military in an adversarial way,” one current Guardian journalist told us.

Indeed, during the last two years of Rusbridger’s editorship, The Guardian published about 110 articles per year tagged as MI6 on its website. Since Viner took over, the average per year has halved and is decreasing year by year.

“Effective scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies — epitomised by the Snowden scoops but also many other stories — appears to have been abandoned,” a former Guardian journalist told us. The former reporter added that, in recent years, it “sometimes seems The Guardian is worried about upsetting the spooks.”

A second former Guardian journalist added: “The Guardian no longer seems to have such a challenging relationship with the intelligence services, and is perhaps seeking to mend fences since Snowden. This is concerning, because spooks are always manipulative and not always to be trusted.”

While some articles critical of the security services still do appear in the paper, its “scoops” increasingly focus on issues more acceptable to them. Since the Snowden affair, The Guardian does not appear to have published any articles based on an intelligence or security services source that was not officially sanctioned to speak.

The Guardian has, by contrast, published a steady stream of exclusives on the major official enemy of the security services, Russia, exposing Putin, his friends and the work of its intelligence services and military.

In the Panama Papers leak in April 2016, which revealed how companies and individuals around the world were using an offshore law firm to avoid paying tax, The Guardian’s front-page launch scoop was authored by Luke Harding, who has received many security service tips focused on the “Russia threat”, and was titled “Revealed: the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin”.

Three sentences into the piece, however, Harding notes that “the president’s name does not appear in any of the records” although he insists that “the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage”.

There was a much bigger story in the Panama Papers which The Guardian chose to downplay by leaving it to the following day. This concerned the father of the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, who “ran an offshore fund that avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas residents – including a part-time bishop – to sign its paperwork”.

We understand there was some argument between journalists about not leading with the Cameron story as the launch splash. Putin’s friends were eventually deemed more important than the Prime Minister of the country where the paper published.

Getting Julian Assange

The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.

One 2017 story came from investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who writes for The Guardian’s sister paper The Observer, titled “When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange”. This concerned the visit of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage to the Ecuadorian embassy in March 2017, organised by the radio station LBC, for whom Farage worked as a presenter. Farage’s producer at LBC accompanied Farage at the meeting, but this was not mentioned by Cadwalladr.

Rather, she posited that this meeting was “potentially … a channel of communication” between WikiLeaks, Farage and Donald Trump, who were all said to be closely linked to Russia, adding that these actors were in a “political alignment” and that “WikiLeaks is, in many ways, the swirling vortex at the centre of everything”.

Yet Cadwalladr’s one official on-the-record source for this speculation was a “highly placed contact with links to US intelligence”, who told her, “When the heat is turned up and all electronic communication, you have to assume, is being intensely monitored, then those are the times when intelligence communication falls back on human couriers. Where you have individuals passing information in ways and places that cannot be monitored.”

It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to undermine Assange.

In 2018, however, The Guardian’s attempted vilification of Assange was significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began on 18 May 2018 with one alleging Assange’s “long-standing relationship with RT”, the Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been closely documented elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or the most minimal circumstantial evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or the Kremlin.

One story, co-authored again by Luke Harding, claimed that “Russian diplomats held secret talks in London … with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK, The Guardian has learned”. The former consul in the Ecuadorian embassy in London at this time, Fidel Narvaez, vigorously denies the existence of any such “escape plot” involving Russia and is involved in a complaint process with The Guardian for insinuating he coordinated such a plot.

This apparent mini-campaign ran until November 2018, culminating in a front-page splash, based on anonymous sources, claiming that Assange had three secret meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

This “scoop” failed all tests of journalistic credibility since it would have been impossible for anyone to have entered the highly secured Ecuadorian embassy three times with no proof. WikiLeaks and others have strongly argued that the story was manufactured and it is telling that The Guardian has since failed to refer to it in its subsequent articles on the Assange case. The Guardian, however, has still not retracted or apologised for the story which remains on its website.

The “exclusive” appeared just two weeks after Paul Johnson had been congratulated for “re-establishing links” between The Guardian and the security services.

The string of Guardian articles, along with the vilification and smear stories about Assange elsewhere in the British media, helped create the conditions for a deal between Ecuador, the UK and the US to expel Assange from the embassy in April. Assange now sits in Belmarsh maximum-security prison where he faces extradition to the US, and life in prison there, on charges under the Espionage Act.

Acting for the establishment

Another major focus of The Guardian’s energies under Viner’s editorship has been to attack the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

The context is that Corbyn appears to have recently been a target of the security services. In 2015, soon after he was elected Labour leader, the Sunday Times reported a serving general warning that “there would be a direct challenge from the army and mass resignations if Corbyn became prime minister”. The source told the newspaper: “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that.”

On 20 May 2017, a little over two weeks before the 2017 General Election, the Daily Telegraph was fed the story that “MI5 opened a file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his links to the IRA”. It formed part of a Telegraph investigation claiming to reveal “Mr Corbyn’s full links to the IRA” and was sourced to an individual “close to” the MI5 investigation, who said “a file had been opened on him by the early nineties”.

The Metropolitan Police Special Branch was also said to be monitoring Corbyn in the same period.

Then, on the very eve of the General Election, the Telegraph gave space to an article from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6, under a headline: “Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation. At MI6, which I once led, he wouldn’t clear the security vetting.”

Further, in September 2018, two anonymous senior government sources told The Times that Corbyn had been “summoned” for a “‘facts of life’ talk on terror” by MI5 chief Andrew Parker.

Just two weeks after news of this private meeting was leaked by the government, the Daily Mail reported another leak, this time revealing that “Jeremy Corbyn’s most influential House of Commons adviser has been barred from entering Ukraine on the grounds that he is a national security threat because of his alleged links to Vladimir Putin’s ‘global propaganda network’.”

The article concerned Andrew Murray, who had been working in Corbyn’s office for a year but had still not received a security pass to enter the UK parliament. The Mail reported, based on what it called “a senior parliamentary source”, that Murray’s application had encountered “vetting problems”.

Murray later heavily suggested that the security services had leaked the story to the Mail. “Call me sceptical if you must, but I do not see journalistic enterprise behind the Mail’s sudden capacity to tease obscure information out of the [Ukrainian security service],” he wrote in the New Statesman. He added, “Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows?”

Murray told us he was approached by the New Statesman after the story about him being banned from Ukraine was leaked. “However,” he added, “I wouldn’t dream of suggesting anything like that to The Guardian, since I do not know any journalists still working there who I could trust.”

The Guardian itself has run a remarkable number of news and comment articles criticising Corbyn since he was elected in 2015 and the paper’s clearly hostile stance has been widely noted.

Given its appeal to traditional Labour supporters, the paper has probably done more to undermine Corbyn than any other. In particular, its massive coverage of alleged widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has helped to disparage Corbyn more than other smears carried in the media.

The Guardian and The Observer have published hundreds of articles on “Labour anti-Semitism” and, since the beginning of this year, carried over 50 such articles with headlines clearly negative to Corbyn. Typical headlines have included “The Observer view: Labour leadership is complicit in anti-Semitism”, “Jeremy Corbyn is either blind to anti-Semitism – or he just doesn’t care”, and “Labour‘s anti-Semitism problem is institutional. It needs investigation”.

The Guardian’s coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically.

While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts.

In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour concluded that the party “is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom race equality law.”

Analysis of two YouGov surveys, conducted in 2015 and 2017, shows that anti-Semitic views held by Labour voters declined substantially in the first two years of Corbyn’s tenure and that such views were significantly more common among Conservative voters.

Despite this, since January 2016, The Guardian has published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-Semitism, an average of around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. In the same period, The Guardian published just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party’s much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example, found that nearly half of the Tory Party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.

At the same time, some stories which paint Corbyn’s critics in a negative light have been suppressed by The Guardian. According to someone with knowledge of the matter, The Guardian declined to publish the results of a months-long critical investigation by one of its reporters into a prominent anti-Corbyn Labour MP, citing only vague legal issues.

In July 2016, one of this article’s authors emailed a Guardian editor asking if he could pitch an investigation about the first attempt by the right-wing of the Labour Party to remove Corbyn, informing The Guardian of very good inside sources on those behind the attempt and their real plans. The approach was rejected as being of no interest before a pitch was even sent.

A reliable publication?

On 20 May 2019, The Times newspaper reported on a Freedom of Information request made by the Rendition Project, a group of academic experts working on torture and rendition issues, which showed that the MOD had been “developing a secret policy on torture that allows ministers to sign off intelligence-sharing that could lead to the abuse of detainees”.

This might traditionally have been a Guardian story, not something for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. According to one civil society source, however, many groups working in this field no longer trust The Guardian.

A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: “It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The Times rather than The Guardian.”

The Times published its scoop under a strong headline, “Torture: Britain breaks law in Ministry of Defence secret policy”. However, before the article was published, the MOD fed The Guardian the same documents The Times were about to splash with, believing it could soften the impact of the revelations by telling its side of the story.

The Guardian posted its own article just before The Times, with a headline that would have pleased the government: “MoD says revised torture guidance does not lower standards”.

Its lead paragraph was a simple summary of the MOD’s position: “The Ministry of Defence has insisted that newly emerged departmental guidance on the sharing of intelligence derived from torture with allies, remains in line with practices agreed in the aftermath of a series of scandals following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” However, an inspection of the documents showed this was clearly disinformation.

The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden go?

#Guardian MI5 MI6 GCHQ Snowden SecurityServices

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petclub · 3 years ago

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Characteristics of the Rottweiler dog breed you should know

Origin and history

Originally, Rottweilers were developed to drive cattle to market. They were later employed to pull butcher carts. They were among the first police dogs, and they serve in the military with distinction. Above all, they are well-liked family guardians and friends. These dogs are powerful and energetic, so novice pet owners should be cautious. They require expert care and instruction. A Rottie is a loving, loyal, and clever companion for life for consistent, enthusiastic pet owners!

The Rottweiler has a long and illustrious history.

The Rottweiler, like the ancient Greek hero Hercules, is a powerful and loyal dog with a kind heart. Affectionately nicknamed Rotties or Rotts, the breed originated in Germany, where it was used to drive cattle and pull carts for farmers and butchers. The Rottie's wide chest and strongly muscled physique indicate her ancestry. He moves with power and energy, yet looking into his eyes reveals warm, dark-brown pools expressing a calm, intelligent, attentive, and courageous demeanour.

A well-bred Rottweiler is confident and serene. He's usually reserved among strangers, but he's never timid or afraid. When presented with unfamiliar individuals and situations, Rottweilers adopt a "wait-and-see" approach.

The Rottweiler is a natural guard dog with a mellow demeanour who is effective not just in police, military, and customs work, but also as a family buddy and protector when these traits come together as they should.

Rotties have a natural drive to defend their family and may be vicious in combat. Early socialisation, firm, fair, consistent instruction and leadership, and a daily duty to fulfil are all necessary to channel their power and protectiveness. Rottweilers can become deadly bullies instead of the companionable guardians they're supposed to be if this doesn't happen.

Rottweilers are torn between being protective and aggressive

They can become too protective if they aren't carefully bred for a calm, intelligent temperament and properly educated and taught. That may seem like just what you want, but a Rottie that can't tell good from bad is harmful to everyone he meets, not just the bad folks.

Without resorting to rage or physical force, you must be able to offer your Rottweiler with leadership he can trust and respect. Otherwise, he'll appoint himself as the top dog. This is a formula for catastrophe when dealing with a dog as strong and clever as the Rottweiler.

Rottweilers are neither temperamentally unstable or intrinsically violent, despite popular belief. Rotties who have been well-socialized and well-bred are lively, kind, and affectionate to their families. They are easy to teach and are excellent friends when treated with respect. Rottweilers are excellent dogs, but they are not for everyone.

You must not only devote yourself to training and socialising your Rottie, but you must also cope with others who are unfamiliar with the breed and have preconceived notions about it.

Some localities have banned Rottweilers and other big breeds due to poor or fatal experiences with them. It's unjust to criticise a whole breed based on the behaviour of a few, but if you own a Rottweiler, you'll have to live with it.

You may help to restore the breed's reputation by teaching your Rottweiler to obey and respect humans. Most importantly, don't leave your Rottie alone in the backyard. This is a dog who is devoted to his owners and longs to spend time with them. You'll be rewarded with one of the best friends in the world if you provide him with the direction and structure he need.

The characteristics of Rottweiler's that make it special

Rottweilers are huge, strong dogs that need to be socialised and trained from the time they are puppies. Expect to be subjected to occasionally harsh pre-judgments about your Rottweiler, as well as inaccurate claims about him and his actions, by others who fear him, even if you train and socialise him.

Because of the current bias against Rottweilers and allegations that they are dangerous, depending on the regulations in your municipality, you may be required to buy additional liability insurance if you own one.

You may not be able to own a Rottweiler in some regions, or you may be compelled to give up any you already have. Rottweilers adore their owners and long to be with them. They may become destructive if they are left alone for long periods of time or do not get enough exercise.

Rottweilers who have been reared with youngsters get along swimmingly. They must, however, be educated what is and is not appropriate conduct with youngsters. Rottweilers have a natural desire to herd and may "bump" children in order to herd them. This "lump" may lead children to tumble over and hurt themselves due to their size.

Furthermore, because some Rottweilers have a strong hunting drive, they may become too excited when youngsters run around and play. When your Rottweiler is near youngsters, always keep an eye on him. If you have an adult Rottweiler, be cautious when introducing other animals, especially dogs. Strange dogs, especially those of the same sex, can make Rottweilers hostile. Your Rottie, on the other hand, will most likely learn to cohabit happily with his new friend under your supervision.

Rottweilers are clever dogs that may be easily trained provided their owners are tough and consistent. Rottweilers will put you to the test to determine whether you truly believe what you say. Make your request clear, and don't leave any gaps for them to exploit. Rottweilers need two 10- to 20-minute walks or playtimes every day. Rottweilers have a double coat that sheds profusely in the spring and fall and more moderately the rest of the year. Snoring is common in Rottweilers. Rotties have a tendency to overeat and acquire weight if their food intake is not controlled.

Never buy a puppy from an irresponsible breeder, puppy mill, or pet store if you want a healthy dog. Look for a trustworthy breeder that thoroughly vets her breeding dogs to ensure that they are free of genetic disorders that might be passed on to the puppies and that they have good temperaments.

The Rottweiler has a long and illustrious history. The Molossus, a mastiff-like dog, is the ancestor of Rottweilers. Their forefathers marched alongside the Romans to Germany, herding the cattle that kept them going as they conquered the known world. The army's large dogs mated with canines native to the places they went through as they journeyed, laying the groundwork for new breeds.

Rottweilers grew in popularity as a cattle market town, the German counterpart of a Texas cowtown, and descendants of the Roman Molossus dogs brought the cattle to town for slaughter. When the cattlemen went home after selling their animals, they placed their loaded purses over the necks of their Rottweilers to keep their money secure from robbers. The dogs were also utilised by butchers in the region to pull carts filled with meat.

Heigh & Weight

Males are generally 24 to 27 inches tall and weigh 95 to 130 pounds. Females are generally 22 to 25 inches tall and weigh 85 to 115 pounds.

Appearance

The perfect Rottweiler is calm, self-assured, and brave, and never timid. He has a self-assured aloofness about him, and he doesn't make friends with anyone haphazardly. When it comes to new individuals or circumstances, he prefers to wait and see. He is devoted to his family and frequently follows them around the house.

This is not a hyperactive dog.

He has a natural urge to defend his family and possessions, but he should never use force against individuals who aren't threatening him. The Rottweiler has a strong work ethic and is intelligent and adaptive. There will be some distinctions between the sexes. Males are silent yet vigilant, continually scanning their environment for any dangers. Females are simpler to manage and may be more loving than men. Both are extremely trainable, but they may be obstinate.

If you don't cooperate, he could try to intimidate or bluff you.

This is not a dog for individuals who aren't confident in themselves or who don't have the time to dedicate to training and supervision. Setting limits and establishing consequences for incorrect conduct need time and patience in order to earn a Rottweiler's respect.

A variety of variables influence temperament, including inheritance, training, and socialisation. Puppies with a good temperament are interested and active, and they like approaching people and being held. Choose a puppy that is in the midst of the pack, rather than one who is abusing his littermates or cowering in the corner.

Rotties, like other dogs, benefit from early socialisation, which includes exposure to a variety of people, sights, noises, and activities. Your Rottweiler puppy will grow up to be a well-rounded dog if he or she is socialised. Enrolling him in puppy kindergarten is a fantastic place to start.

Regularly inviting guests over and taking him to crowded parks, dog-friendly businesses, and leisurely strolls to meet neighbours can all help him improve his social skills.

How to take care of a Rottweiler

It is critical for Rottweilers to reside in the same house as their owners. They can grow bored, disruptive, and aggressive if left alone in the backyard all day. Rottweilers, despite their size, are sedentary inside.

A Rottweiler is a homebody, but he needs a fenced yard not just to keep him safe from traffic, but also because he may be violent against other dogs and strangers. If your Rottie truly wants to go out, an underground electrical fence won't keep him in your yard. It also does not prevent humans or other animals from entering your property. Place a notice on your property warning outsiders and non-family members not to enter without your permission.

Rottweilers who are somewhat active will benefit from a couple of daily 15 to 30 minute walks. They also like trekking and playing with balls. Longer exercise durations and more organised activities may be required for more energetic Rottweilers.

Their agility, intelligence, and trainability make them ideal for agility and obedience competitions, as well as tracking, therapeutic work, and their traditional duty of pulling a cart or wagon. Parades will love it!

How to train your Rottweiler dog

Keep in mind that your Rottweiler thrives on mental stimulation when teaching him. He is eager to satisfy you and enjoys learning new things. Your Rottweiler will repay you with his rapid ability to learn if you are fair, consistent, and firm.

Given a steady routine, no chances for accidents in the home, and positive reward when he potties outside, housetraining your Rottweiler shouldn't be tough.

Get a Dog Training Guide Now!

Rottweiler Feeding Schedule

4 to 10 cups of high-quality dry food each day, split into two meals, is the recommended daily quantity. The amount of food your adult dog consumes is determined by his size, age, build, metabolism, and degree of activity. Dogs, like people, are unique individuals that require different amounts of food.

It practically goes without saying that a dog that is very active will require more than a dog who is sedentary. The type of dog food you buy makes a difference as well; the better the dog food, the more it will nourish your dog and the less you'll have to shake into his bowl.

Rather than putting food out all the time, measure his food and feed him twice a day to keep your Rottweiler in excellent health. Give him the eye and hands-on tests if you're not sure if he's overweight.

Grooming and color of the coat

Rottweilers have a short, straight, coarse double coat. The outer coat is medium in length, with the head, ears, and legs being shorter; the undercoat is mostly located on the neck and thighs. Your Rottie's undercoat thickness is determined by the climate in which he lives.

The Rottweiler is always black, with rust to mahogany coloured markings. Over the eyes, on the cheeks, on either side of the nose, on the chest and legs, and behind the tail, the marks appear. On the toes, there are additional tan lines that seem like pencil markings. To eliminate dead hair and disperse skin oils, brush your Rottie once a week with a hard bristle brush.

He'll shed twice a year, and you'll need to brush him more often at that time to keep the loose hair in check. As needed, give him a bath. If you bathe him outside, the weather should be warm enough that you don't need long sleeves or a coat.

It's too chilly to give your Rottie a wash outside if you aren't. Brush your Rottie's teeth at least twice or three times a week to get rid of tartar and the bacteria that live inside it. Brushing your teeth on a daily basis is even preferable if you want to avoid gum disease and foul breath.

Get a Dog Training Guide Now!

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#dogtraining #pettraining #rottweiler

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khalilhumam · 4 years ago

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Around the halls: Brookings experts on defense react to the nomination of Gen. Lloyd Austin

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/around-the-halls-brookings-experts-on-defense-react-to-the-nomination-of-gen-lloyd-austin/

Around the halls: Brookings experts on defense react to the nomination of Gen. Lloyd Austin

By Michael E. O'Hanlon, Bruce Riedel, Tom Stefanick, Caitlin Talmadge President-elect Joe Biden has nominated retired General Lloyd Austin to be the next secretary of defense. Lloyd is a former commander of the U.S. military effort in Iraq, and if confirmed, he would be the first African-American to lead the Pentagon. General Austin’s nomination comes with some controversy: He would have to get a congressional waiver to serve, since he has been out of the military for only four years (less than the seven-year waiting period U.S. law requires). Here, Brookings experts on defense weigh in on what his nomination means.

Michael O’Hanlon (@MichaelEOHanlon), Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology: Retired General Lloyd Austin is what I call a “soldier’s soldier.” He is popular among many troops that served under his command over the past couple decades, as I can attest from a number of conversations over the years (admittedly statistically non-rigorous). He was an important part of the success of the surge in Iraq, where he succeeded General Ray Odierno as the deputy commander in 2008 — helping General David Petraeus with the massive coordination of Iraqi and American (and some other) troops to key parts of the country. The surge, whatever its other effects, was an absolutely stunning military success that gave Iraqis another chance at rebuilding their country. Austin’s legacy at Central Command, where he finished his military career as combatant commander in 2016, is more complicated. ISIS rose during the period he was there, and it still controlled large swaths of Syria and Iraq when he stepped down. As ISIS rose, President Obama infamously called it the “JV team” of international terrorism, and it is possible that Austin went along with this sort of interpretation at first. The initial campaign lacked a certain energy. It did hold off ISIS as it attempted to threaten Iraqi Kurdistan and Baghdad — but only with the help of Iran-based militias. That said, by the time Austin left and certainly by the time Obama himself left office a year later, the campaign to defeat ISIS was coming together. Rebuilding the Iraqi military to do the heavy lifting on the ground, while we provided airpower and intelligence and some involvement by special forces, was much of the essence of the strategy. It was the correct strategy, since it avoided big U.S. deployments and any large American combat role. Austin deserves at least some credit for its conceptualization and early implementation. All of this is to say that Austin is an accomplished military leader — and, by my personal experience, an affable guy and good listener, too. But it is worth underscoring that his main experiences in the latter years of his service involve the Middle East. I consider today’s top three challenges for the secretary of defense to be China, Russia, and technology/military modernization. Austin will have lots of catch-up work to do to get these right. Notably, dealing with China and Russia requires finesse, confidence, and calm. We must be resolute. But we must avoid letting small crises needlessly and dangerously escalate, and must look for ways to reduce tensions wherever possible. Finally, there is the matter of civil-military relations. Many are worried that, like James Mattis before him, Austin would require a waiver from the U.S. law that requires anyone be out of uniform for seven years before taking the helm at the Department of Defense. This is a sound law and any waiver should be considered carefully.

While the fact of Austin being a recently retired general is a strike against his confirmation, it should not be a fatal one.

Still, my bottom line is that while the fact of Austin being a recently retired general is a strike against his confirmation, it should not be a fatal one. I consider the state of civil-military relations in the United States generally healthy today. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s case notwithstanding, the military knows its place in our system of government. There are no modern-day Douglas MacArthurs or Curtis LeMays or William Westmorelands that I can detect. We don’t have lots of retired five-star officers floating around the country like we did after World War II, when the original law mandating a “cooling off” period for any retired officer was first written. In fact, we have no retired five-stars any more. I have detected no signs of insubordination in recent decades, or attempts by military officers to pressure recent administrations into policies that somehow the uniformed military collectively preferred but civilians did not. And I do not see generals and admirals trying to over-militarize U.S. foreign policy; they are often the voices calling for restraint, in fact. It was George W. Bush, for example, who promoted the Iraq invasion, as well as the 2007-2008 surge, and it was Barack Obama who pushed the Afghanistan buildup. Retired generals Vincent Brooks and Joseph Dunford, among others, tried very hard to prevent war against North Korea in 2017, as another example. So did retired general and Secretary of Defense Mattis. On balance, I will support Austin personally, even as I remain convinced that Michèle Flournoy was the stronger pick. My view is that, to be effective, Austin will need to focus like a laser on Russia, China, and military modernization and innovation. The stakes are quite high. Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy: General Lloyd Austin will be a great secretary of defense, his career leaves me with no doubt about that. The question is not about his qualifications but about the wisdom of another waiver of the law that a uniformed officer has to wait a seven year cooling-off period before being eligible for the position. Having worked in the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary of defense, I strongly support the principle of civilian oversight. It should only be waived in extraordinary circumstances. In 2017, there was an extraordinary circumstance: The president of the United States was demonstrably unsuitable for the office and a threat to our democracy. That is more clear today than ever. Retired General James Mattis would serve as a controlling influence on the decisionmaking of an unfit and dangerous president. A waiver was fully warranted to ensure safe hands on the American military. Mattis did play that crucial role for two years. It is likely for example that he prevented the return of torture to America. No such danger will be the case after January 20, 2021 if Joe Biden is inaugurated president. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are experienced leaders who are fully committed to the rule of law. They will not embark on reckless behavior that threatens the survival of our democracy and the republic, or do the bidding of a foreign power. The secretary of defense should be a qualified civilian with past experience in the government who can offer her advise to the president, including on occasion advise the White House doesn’t want to hear. The two secretaries I worked for, William Perry and William Cohen, preformed just such roles. Michèle Flourney is an excellent choice to follow them. General Austin is the perfect choice to succeed her in four years. Tom Stefanick, Visiting Fellow in the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology: The recent election resulted in a decision that millions of Americans don’t agree with, but the decision was made fairly. President-elect Biden, in turn, will be making thousands of consequential decisions, and I trust that he will make them in a principled way. He weighed many opinions in his choice for secretary of defense, and made a decision that takes into account many factors and qualifications. The most important qualification for the leadership team that America needs is the ability to function well together under pressure. It appears that Biden has weighed that factor heavily in his choice. Concerns about civil-military relations are serious, but rather than try to second-guess the incoming commander-in-chief as he is building his team, experts in foreign policy and civil-military relations should be refining concrete solutions to address the situation in a way that supports the Biden-Austin team, and reinforce the crucial principle of civilian control over a nonpolitical military. Caitlin Talmadge (@ProfTalmadge), Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology: Presidents enjoy the prerogative of nominating members of the cabinet based on whatever criteria they value most. Selections are not just about expertise or experience, though those are important, but also about personal relationships, politics, and priorities. President-elect Biden has reminded everyone of these basic facts in his nomination of retired four-star Army General Lloyd Austin to be secretary of defense. Biden’s choice is historic because if confirmed, Austin would be the first Black person to helm the Pentagon. The choice is also understandable given the close relationship that Biden and Austin apparently developed during the Obama administration and the alignment of their views on some important policy issues in that period. Furthermore, despite some criticism of Austin because the regional focus of much of his career has been the Middle East — rather than Asia, where growing tensions with China seem likely to require much focus from the future secretary — Austin is without a doubt qualified for the position in terms of substantive knowledge and leadership experience. Numerous other secretaries of defense have brought quite a bit less to the office on both counts. The civil-military implications of Austin’s nomination are troubling, however. Austin left active duty only four years ago, meaning he will require a waiver from Congress in order to serve as the senior civilian at the Department of Defense. This rule, enacted in 1947, has been waived only twice before, and it exists for a reason. The Pentagon already has senior military leadership in the form of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His job is to provide the best possible military advice to the president. The secretary of defense, by contrast, is supposed to provide both civilian oversight of the military — a defining feature of democratic governance — as well as a civilian perspective to the president when he must make hard decisions.

There is value in the president hearing a diversity of views.

In practice, neither the military nor the civilian advice a president receives is ever perfect or unbiased. But there is value in the president hearing a diversity of views. It becomes harder to generate that diversity when both the military and civilian staffs that are supposed to provide advice are run by individuals whose thinking and worldview have been overwhelmingly shaped by the experience of being a senior military officer. In addition, in the long run, the expectation that officers might go on to serve as senior civilians after retirement raises the risk that the prospect of future political appointments may color military advice given while on active duty. And repeatedly drawing on retired general officers to serve as secretary will also generate the impression that civilians are not qualified to be defense leaders, which is not only flat wrong, but also antithetical to democratic values. Many who supported a waiver for retired General James Mattis to serve as defense secretary in 2017 did so because they believed there was no viable alternative to his selection. Large swaths of the Republican national security establishment had declared themselves “Never Trumpers,” leaving Trump few civilian alternatives. President-elect Biden did not have this problem, however; he had a deep Democratic national security bench on which to draw. In particular, Michèle Flournoy, a highly regarded defense expert with significant Pentagon experience, was completely qualified for the position and would have brought a welcome restoration of civilian leadership to the Pentagon. Nominating her also would have clearly demarcated the Mattis experience as an anomaly. (I worked for Flournoy from 2003 to 2004, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.) Instead, Austin’s nomination erodes that norm of civilian control. It also risks repeating some of the problems of Mattis’ tenure, many of which stemmed directly from the fact that he was a recently retired four-star, not just the fact that he had to work for Donald Trump. On Syria, for example — the issue that ostensibly led to Mattis’ resignation — Mattis consistently pushed policy in a direction that aligned more with the views of the top brass than with the president. All this said, Biden has made his nomination, one he is entitled to make, and Democrats should avoid undermining their own president’s historic pick for secretary of defense. But they should recognize that granting Austin the waiver will likely change the nature of the secretary’s role in ways that long outlive the Biden administration. Members of Congress should ask plenty of questions about Austin’s commitment to civilian control and think hard about the other leadership posts in the department, which will be important not only to elevate civilian perspectives but also to address the range of issues Austin will face on day one.

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nukaworld · 7 years ago

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overboss replied to your post “i havent talked about Preston in a while I’m getting withdrawal...”

Ooooh what are your thoughts on preston ever becoming the general??? ��

I think Preston is absolutely qualified to lead the Minutemen and he has actually lead a group of people to safety against all odds. He is brave, he is very smart and has a tactical mind but more importantly he has a kind heart and a lot of compassion - this would make him a great leader.

Few things I think hold him back from taking the role of General himself (aside from Bethesda needing you to have a faction to lead)

His age. I don’t know how old he is but by the math he is 22, by his behavior anywhere from 22-28 if you ask me. He is smart, he is skilled but I think he needs more experience before taking on an entire faction - this assumption was probably made with Military Vet Nate who would fit the role of General and not Lawyer Graduate Nora who is most likely less qualified to be General than Preston by a long shot. Hence why making Nate the default was bad.

His mental illness. Preston is dealing with severe depression and is suicidal when you find him, and while he does get better through your friendship he is still working kind of on autopilot. This game does not address the fact that he probably suffers from PTSD and he is going through a rough time in his life so maybe a bit off weight off his shoulders would be good for him.

He doesn’t want to actually be responsible for so many people because he feels guilty over what happened between Quincy and Concord and blames the deaths of most of his party on his failed leadership when in fact he did more than anyone else would given the circumstances.

However this is also all written by Bethesda since he is a character and not a sentient person so the cards are more or less stacked against him from the start so that we can have Military Vet Default Nate be the leader of the Military Faction That You Can’t Destroy So You Can Actually End The Game and all that crap, when in his concept art Preston looked in his 30s and more like a wastelander leading other wastelanders as an army against raiders and supermutants to protect the innocent where in the actual game now he seems more timid and less in the tone of Fallout as a whole so I am saying it was rigged against him being General the moment they changed him from the concept art where it said “General of the Minutemen”

And since the only other character that parallels being your second in command is Gage, at least more or less Gage has a weird but understandable reason for doing what he is doing where Preston just really really had someone at Bethesda dislike him. Still this game makes you General on the assumption that you are playing Nate and if you are playing Nora you can work around it and that your Sole is in their late 20s-early 30s so you are older than Preston and in fact most of the game doesn’t work if you are like me and your Sole is like a 21 year old dumbass but this is waaaay off course so I will end my ranting right here!

#magpie talks shit #Preston Garvey #thank you for coming to my ted talk

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ourcollectivefantasy · 8 years ago

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I think Aelberyn should answer....every fifth question in the angst meme. Yes! Do the thing!

Oh goodness. Welp. You asked for it!

1. What’s one experience your character had that made them very afraid?

Throughout her nearly 40 years of life, Aelberyn has experienced a great deal of terrifying and horrible things. It makes sense - a lot of terrifying and horrible things have happened to the blood elves in the last 40 years. Honestly I think the most afraid she has ever been was when her friend Leighrian helped her escape Lordaeron right as it was taken by Arthas. She truly was helpless at the time, young and innocent and very shy, with absolutely no knowledge of the outside world. From there they travelled basically on the heels of the Scourge army, walking through the devastation of what became known as the Plaguelands for months until she arrived at a destroyed and decimated Quel'thalas. She literally had to climb over corpses to make her way home. It was very horrifying, and if she had been alone Aelberyn is certain she would have been dead. From that point on, the things that she goes through in life, she measures it against that experience. Some definitely are terrible - her recent captivity is right up there - but nothing has made her feel so completely weak, helpless, and alone as that.

5. Would they ever turn on someone they just met in order to save themselves?

Well honestly that depends on the situation. 99 times out of 100, the answer is no: Aelberyn would assume the leadership duties and the Priestess mindset of giving of herself for the good of others, even if she does not know them well. But if the individual was someone who she just met but also had made themselves a clear enemy to her and those in her care, then yes. She would judge her own survival of far greater importance.

10. What were the character’s parents like? What was the affect the parents had on the character?

Navarias and Aelenna Bloodsword were arranged to be married, but quickly grew to fall in love. Navarias was a military man from a long line of military leaders, quiet and dignified, but he was completely entranced by Aelenna Nightheart who was a warm, clever woman with minor talent in healing and gardening, and she in turn grew incredibly fond of her stoic husband. They were married happily for 200 years, but were having difficulty having children until finally they had Aelberyn. Aelenna just absolutely adored her daughter, and fully intended to raise her to embrace her legacy from both the Bloodswords and her former House, but tragedy struck when an incurable illness killed Aelenna when Aelberyn was 3 years old.

From that point, the greatest source of affection and support was erased from Aelberyn's life. Navarias deeply mourned his wife's loss, and handled it by distancing himself from the daughter who physically resembled her and shuffling her off to Lordaeron Abby as soon as she was old enough. Navarias' distance and coldness caused Aelberyn to respect her father as her father and leader of her house, but not to feel any deep bond with him or any other members of her family.

15. What is their biggest fear? What in general scares them? How do they act when they’re scared?

I would say that, above all things, Aelberyn is afraid of complete failure to everyone she cares about due to her own inability to prevent it. It's a bit existential, but it's something that's been a part of all of the most horrible things in her life. When bad things happen, she's observed it's because she wasn't there to stop it, was helpless or too weak to stop it, or didn't seize control of the situation early enough to make a plan and prepare for it. In general, a lack of control scares her, and when she gets scared she gets angry, sometimes violently angry, in an effort to regain control of SOMETHING.

20. What was something they struggled with greatly and how did they overcome it?

Hmm. Perhaps her biggest struggle was the transition from shy if occasionally rebellious Acolyte to a confident, strong Lady of her House. Her best friend Leighrian started her down that way by providing an excellent example and instilling an appriciation for being proactive rather than waiting for things to just happen. However, it wasn't until her father died and her Seneschal began to hardcore instruct her on leading her House that she was forcibly yanked from a comfortable, quiet life as a Priestess of the Light to an assertive noblewoman. The lessons were not particularly gentle, and once her cousin also became an advisor they became even more punishing.

Yet, even to this day, many years and countless experiences later, Aelberyn still needs to get away from people from time to time and be introverted and quiet.

25. Do they find that they care what others think of them? Or do they not really mind how others view them?

Yes and no. Aelberyn recognizes that the way people see her reflects on her House, and so she definitely cares that people see her as strong, confident, and thoughtful. That said, she has observed how fickle public opinion can be in regards to gossip, and how easy it can be swayed one way or another. Most of all, she has observed how people respond unfavorably to her in regards to that strength and confidence in a manner they would not if she were male. She also has seen how people, upon learning how young she is for what she does in life, are incapable of seeing beyond her youth in regards to her choices. So, basically, she has decided to focus on maintaining control and dignity when possible and making certain no one thinks she or her House is weak or exploitable. Beyond that she tries not to worry too much more about how people see her (with more success on some days over others).

30. What makes them feel safe or secure? What makes them feel insecure or unsafe?

It's terribly cliche perhaps, but honestly Iloam is the one person in the world who actively makes Aelberyn feel safe. After it was repeatedly instilled in her never to trust anyone, never to be comfortable or let your guard down, it took a few years and a lot of patience with risk-taking on his part for him to convince her to trust him. But now that she does? Well, honestly, she didn't really know who "she " was until she finally let herself be free and open to him. He is the only person to see everything under her nobility and responsibilities, not only because he accepts who she is and appreciates it, but because she knows that he will tell her bluntly and honestly when she's screwing up. He helps her be a better leader - really a better person. Quite a few times he's given her other options to consider rather than an angry response to some jerk being a jerk.

Beyond that, their home in a castle in western Lordaeron is the place she feels most at ease. Iloam gave it to her about 6 months after they started their relationship, and they spent years rebuilding and renovating it and adding their personal touches. When the twins were born, and they finally agreed it was time to bring servants, they only brought a tiny handful of servants they could personally trust to be discrete and loyal. Aelberyn is far more relaxed and at peace in her home they built together than the ancient estate of Bloodsword Hall that has been the traditional keep of her family since they were first established in Quel'thalas.

Thank you, @fairstrike ♡♡♡

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glopratchet · 4 years ago

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origin-of-astrly-wylde

so he's not exactly the most reliable source for information on how to use a mirror world in an area called the "Mouth of Hell" They were never seen again One is a male, and one female But his darkness has corrupted almost all of his memory, almost all of his experiences with the two people who were once close to being equal through personal conflict, personal anguish, fury, power, and most importantly greed sludge he always has in his patch pocket, a souvenier from touristing through the human wretched world at all hours of the night, " don't let anyting in "Get outta my head! their wishes and takes one of the wobbly kitchen chairs swinging it around and smashing it on the ground "Perfect until the thought that maybe they won't find his brains funny anymore and just kill him one day controlling his mind he thinks severely to himself, " you idiot! He cuts open his wrist with a fang he had found during one of his youthful transforming sessions he thinks again to himself, " dying over a thought! what is wrong with you! don't you kill yourself? " they think back, " you need mental help Mental help, haha! "I can create worlds the female voice laughs, " you sound pathetic "Screw you Aradia! " he replies quietly to exist in his unconciousness micr0cosm "She's right you know, I don't belive you should be doing this, again, "Om is never wrong I just want to go back to the raves, that was he life" "Was? and much harder to navigate Things foreign and unknown have befallen his creatoy firmwse away from the voice, " sleep As the demonic serpent tightly licks and sucks on his sore 20 year old human ears, he succombs to sleepy darkness that he had a lot to forget and he has a lot of work to rebuild his creatoy firmwse but, how long can he hold out before succumbing to the slience? and he is no stranger to pain having enjoyed his early years in the ring with real blood and gore he has to force shut down with only the keyboard and mouse staying lit up The figure with the hood keeps on to stare at him documents, web archives, twitter info, media files, and music tracks " your soul, it questions "Does this make sense to you? that he couldn't quite remember after so much recollection of forgotten memories Nightmare Tyrant and Hell Beast make vivid images of fear inside the being's head "They don't fit do they? I never really knew you, after the Nightmare Tyrant image, Aradia finding out about hell brews, cybernetic dog saying numbers that could lead to capabilities of a greater power never used mentally images of the demon lord, Aradia unknowingly drinking her beer mixes with demonic blood, the cybernetic dog increasingly using more of hell vocabulary the mental figure of the demon lord, Aradia drinking her beer takes with bloody mouth, Symbio trying to speak "666" star lusting praise of demon lord, Aradia bloody beer drinking, the black canine say numbers in order to mold a new ui, Astryl tries to asleep thinking about the demon lord, Aradia lightly trying to type away at the keyboard, even the dog's kennel seems a little destroyed slob eating dead corpses in necropolitical heaven, Aradia trying to contact the team on chat, but the do Apocalypse demonic intelligent beings awaiting to spawn out the eyes, nose, and ears, Aradia's finger rapidly shaking around the F10 key Apocalypse world war 3 elements mixed with doomsday radiation in gigantic pain, Aradia's contact has suffered glitching out of existance in tremendous pain, Aradia's contact info disappeared from the screen in the pain, Aradia goes offline Bleeding walls of terrifying demonic scriptures from all directions fill his surroundings in an dark corner, Demons appear in the form of glitching out of existence Apocalypse military weapons ready to be used for destruction They can see you her appearance glitching out of television standards Technology Satan Technology for neural connection, where it can scan the brain and transfer memory, the decaying false saint, Aradia tries to relive happy it into the exit, the demonic forces wrench her figures while trying to escape "Wake me up, " She begs to you, falling unconscious her figures in beautiful proportions and not decaying, Aradia touching herself "Zal? She says weakly in and out of existance, Jacob forces a large, heavy metal object upon your chest Ding Arrrrgghh! the granite, Apocalypse military weaponry combining the signs and games have combined! Oof! Another metal door out of nowhere! Astryl amorphous decoding the granite, the controls, they look Apocalypse power suit thrusters raising to face the demons, Apocalypse world war 3 radio active toxic gas, you inhale! Astryl brightest frisking the controls, sluggishly while hearing demonic roars, Apocalypse biological weapons unleashing a volley of rust in your brain her wounds while hearing demonic roars, The rusted bolts slowly turn noisily from outside Apocalypse doomsday weapons capable of destroying demons Astryl humorous reawakening sluggishly while hearing demonic roars, Astryl economic cleaning her wounds while hearing demonic roars, the DOOM symbol on the doors, it's time to open it now They slip wordlessly from their restraints and turn noiselessly Astryl bottomless bleaching the DOOM symbol on the doors, a new frontal mind shield and a needler rifle begins forming in your hand Astryl considerable constructing a new frontal mind shield and around John's immobile corpse, he is still alive Convenient, seeing that this is the last barrier Astryl handsome ballooning around John's immobile corpse, from your behind, tearing it a minor injury as part of the process You don't know how to feel about that It doesn't exactly hurt Astryl gaussian emerging from your behind, briefly as her arms/tech are restored, Aradia suddenly grips you strongly from your shoulders There is an ominous silence Astryl extra creational vibrating briefly as her arms/tech are restored, the dooms day weapon, Apocalypse military weaponry blows away a large portion of their flock, casting them into oblivion, where they cannot combine or recombine Astryl instrumental launching the dooms day weapon, the health of John the Hermit, he lasted much longer than expected! John: Astryl, Doomguide of Nyarlothotep Astryl petrochemical monitoring the health of John the Hermit, the future intentions of the man in front of her Him: Robes tattered and destroyed Hands bound behind his back Astryl jovial explaining the future intentions of the man in front of her in a low tone John the Hermit - otherwise known as Johnny the Cave-Dweller Astryl high-frequency humming in a low tone through your languages, it sounds vaguely German Oh how I long for those days still Astryl symphonic adventuring through your languages, They take our freedom Yet you rebel from my leadership we live in a nightmarish apocalypse so I help others Others not of the cult, I see no human faces anymore nobody trusts each other since the last Church of Christ's Unity election Seems like a foolish thing to rebel over Yet we continue to kill and fight for an "Undead Lord True It has benefited me quite well, actually John! You grip John face, ready to kill Apocalypse military weaponry blowing metal body-armor and demon-flesh to oblivion like candy Freedom You find yourself in a dim cave

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englishchinesetranslations · 5 years ago

Link

This is the first in a four-part mini-series of articles focused on key counterfactuals in the Asia-Pacific.

History, paraphrased by the British historian Niall Fergusson in Civilization, can be taught in many ways. Lamenting the lack of proper context and structure in British sixth-form school history classes, Ferguson quotes the playwright and actor Alan Bennett: “There is a trilemma in history teaching today. Should history be taught as a mode of contrarian argumentation, a communion with past Truth and Beauty or is it just one … thing after another?”

One often underestimated but immensely popular form is the “What if?” form, or counterfactual history. Often derided as mere fiction, or in the words of the historian and international relations scholar E.H. Carr “mere parlor games,” plausible counterfactual history can in fact be very useful. It can be a tool to enhance the understanding of history and make it come alive. It can reveal, often in stark detail, how the world could, or even should, be. History is the literature of what has happened; counterfactuals can lead to the questioning of long-held assumptions.

A great place to start reading contrafactual history is the Collected What If?, edited by Robert Cowley. It includes over 20 essays written by authors like John Keegan, Stephen E. Ambrose, and Caleb Carr. This is the first of the the Diplomat’s four holiday counterfactual articles which will be presented over the next few weeks.

What if Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomingtang had won the Chinese Civil War?

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In The Collected What Ifs?, distinguished Professor Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania argues that in the spring of 1946, the Nationalists could have militarily defeated the communists under Mao Zedong. Late in 1945, after the Japanese surrender, Chiang had begun to airlift his battle-hardened, U.S.-equipped troops to Manchuria, where the Chinese Red Army (not to be confused with its Soviet namesake) had made its main base.

The communists resisted but, having avoided the worst of the fighting against the Japanese during World War II, were quickly defeated by Chiang’s veteran troops. Many of these men had been fighting for several years in the China-Burma-India (CBI) campaign, and were led by well-trained (and, for a change, mostly non-corrupt) officers. The Nationalists were able to decisively defeat the Red Army at a month-long battle in Sipingjie in May 1946, occupying Southern Manchuria. Lin Biao, one of Mao’s favorite generals, threw 100,000 conscripted factory workers into the path of the advancing Nationalist army, to little avail. The suburbs of Harbin, the gateway to the north, had been reached by the advancing Nationalist units by early June.

However, at the moment of victory, Chiang called a halt. This proved to be a fatal a mistake from which the Nationalists never recovered. Within three years, the communists reorganized and counterattacked, eventually pushing Chiang’s forces out of China proper to Taiwan. The reason for this can be summarized in two names: U.S. President Harry Truman and George C. Marshall. Both these men were undoubtedly great statesmen, but had little experience in navigating the “snake pit of Chinese politics.”

After several failed diplomatic missions (notably the Dixie and Hurley missions), Truman sent his heavyweight secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, to negotiate a coalition government between Mao and Chiang. Marshall ultimately become famous for his ability to inspire his subordinates and build bridges between conflicting personalities, as well as the Marshall Plan, a keystone of Europe’s post-war economic recovery.

However, Marshall was completely unprepared for the political situation that met him in China in 1946. Although Chiang was dependent on the Americans for military aid and support, that hardly meant he trusted them. Much of this was not Marshall’s fault. Chiang’s trust in the U.S. had been severely strained by his sour relationship with General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the U.S. commander in the CBI theatre. (As Jay Taylor writes, Stilwell basically hated Chiang due to his perceived corruption and incompetence, calling him “the Peanut,” and at one stage requested that the Office of Strategic Services plan an assassination of the Nationalist generalissimo.)

Marshall requested that the Nationalists call off their offensive in Manchuria, or risk losing American support. Chiang reluctantly agreed. His shocked generals begged him to be allowed to capture Harbin, which might have dealt a knock-out blow to the Red Army. On the other hand, the Nationalists’ supply lines were stretched perilously thin, and a continued advance could have exposed their flanks to the sort of guerilla tactics that Mao’s forces were so adept at. In any case, this represented the last chance the Nationalists had at defeating the communists militarily.

What if Chiang had either ignored Marshall’s request, or what if the Truman administration had never requested it in the first place? These questions are the first order counterfactuals in this hypothetical scenario.

The Soviet Union had invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the twilight weeks of the Pacific War. Under the Soviet Red Army’s protection, Mao’s forces were given weapons and allowed to reorganize in late 1945. This represented a crucial move for Mao’s forces, as their previous headquarters in Yanan was strategically isolated from the most populous parts of China. However, the Soviets were on speaking terms with the Nationalists as well. When Chiang asked Moscow to withdraw its troops from Manchuria by May 1946, the Soviets obliged, perhaps, as Tanner suggests, reassured by American and British guarantees of the preservation of Soviet interests in the region.

Looking into our contrafactual crystal ball, several possibilities arise. If it had been possible that the Nationalists were able to overrun Manchuria as quickly as Chiang’s generals promised, China might still be under the Kuomingtang (or some derivative) today. However, it is far from certain that Stalin would have accepted the wholesale conquest of Manchuria by Chiang’s regime. The KMT had enormous problems trying to govern China in the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps China would have fragmented again, as it had so many times during its history.

If Chiang had elected to ignore the Americans’ request, the Cold War and the present day might look very different as well (here we get into second- and third-order counterfactuals). While the KMT were on relatively good terms with the Soviet Union, it is perhaps more likely to believe that Chiang would have gravitated either towards the U.S. or a non-aligned movement. This could have meant that China would have been integrated in the post-war U.S. order, in essence becoming another South Korea, or might have entailed a looser association, as for example the U.S. and France.

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Another aspect of the hypothetical path is the differences that could have occurred within China’s domestic politics. Would humanitarian disasters on the scale of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution have occurred without Mao’s regime? Probably not, but considering Chiang’s record of human rights abuses and authoritarian leadership, China, under Nationalist rule, could have suffered some serious internal challenges all the same. Chiang was not exactly an ardent advocate for human rights and democracy.

How China’s economic development might have progressed under Chiang is another interesting hypothetical. Historically, the KMT on Taiwan was able to spark a remarkable economic recovery, becoming one of the so-called “Asian Tigers” by following the “Developmental State” model. Could the Nationalists have recreated this on the mainland if they had been victorious over Mao’s forces? There are many variables—most notably the vast difference in size between Taiwan and the mainland—but that the CCP has been largely able to achieve breakneck economic growth since the late 1970s at least indicates that it is possible. Another alternative is that China would have stagnated due to the KMT’s endemic corruption and mismanagement, ending up as a poor country even today.

Another interesting scenario is that Moscow and Washington could have pressured Chiang and Mao into accepting a division of China, much like Korea or Germany. In this case, there is a possibility that China would have become another ideological battleground of the Cold War. For one thing, Communist China might have been much more dependent and aligned with the Soviet Union than it historically was. The renowned scholar Chen Jian of Cornell University argues the case that Mao was in essence a nationalist ideological warrior; it is far from certain that he would have accepted a division of the country. However, parts of the CCP leadership conceivably could have, which might have led to him being deposed in a Soviet-backed coup. As the Brezhnev doctrine later proved, Moscow had no compulsions about deposing supposed client rulers who didn’t fall in line.

How this would have been resolved with the collapse of the Soviet Union is an interesting question. If the KMT had been able to keep the country together and been able to develop economically, perhaps Nationalist China would have absorbed its communist neighbor, as happened in Germany. Or maybe our contrafactual “People’s Republic of China” would have become another North Korea: belligerent, dangerous and desperately poor.

History is learning about what has been. That does not mean that it’s impossible to think of history as it could have been or even should have been. Only by making some plausible assumptions about what would have happened if history had taken a different path than it actually did is it possible to understand the full implications of the present day.

#world war 2 #kmt #kuomintang #china

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whatisonthemoonarchive · 5 years ago

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Robert Maynard & CAUSA

First off Robert, I want to apologize for coming across adversarial. I think your heart is in the right place. I sometimes allow my emotions to get the better part of me. So, please accept my apologies here.

Actually, I didn't realize that you were a lecturer with CAUSA. I do remember you mentioning being a member, just not the lecturing part. I guess if I think about it more, probably all CAUSA members had to lecture at some point.

I was glad to see you quote from the "WACL expose book", once again. In other parts of the book, the authors did a good job in revealing Bo Hi Pak's unsavory connections, ect. However, the book really doesn't address the specific roles of the American CAUSA members. That said, there was, one, very important footnote where Tom Ward's name pops up:

"Alfredo Mingoila, an Argentine secret service agent imprisoned in La Paz [capital of Bolivia] by President Suazo in 1983, told the magazine Der Stern in 1984 that Thomas Ward (a member of the board of CAUSA International) had a direct hand in organizing the coup d'etat of July 17, 1980. He said Ward had worked with the boss of the World Anti-Communist League's Bolivian branch, and in particular with Klaus Barbie, who at the time was helping in the preparations with Colonel Luis Arce Gomez.

In 1984, confirming information coming from Moonie defectors from New York and the Bolivian Interior Ministry revealed that Moon and CAUSA offered $4 million to the 1980 putschists."

https://ia802907.us.archive.org/9/items/pdfy-YAnJOkt3G0B4uEGh/Scott%20%26%20Jon%20Lee%20Anderson%20-%20Inside%20the%20League%20%281986%29.pdf, p. 331

Robert, how do you feel about Tom Ward? What do you think about his connections with Klaus Barbie the Nazi war criminal? Moreover, what else might you know, having been a CAUSA member, about how things "went down" in 1979-81 when Bo Hi Pak, Antonio Betancourt, Tom Ward, Bill Selig & Paul Perry got involved with people in Bolivia that were a part of the cocaine trade (not mentioned in the above excerpt)?

To give you more to think about, Robert, I want to submit excerpts from an article written by a German journalist, who went "undercover" to Bolivia to research the activities of Klaus Barbie. When his cover was blown, he had to flee, but not before gathering the information, that he wrote in this article:

It was not until 1983 that the Bolivian Ministry of the Interior and Bolivian journalists determined that...the Moon sect—as well as others—had invested about $4 million into the preparation of the coup. Membership lists of the political Moon organization "Causa" were found. At the top of the lists were the names of almost all the leading military personnel who, at the same time, had been honoring the swastika in Barbie's lodge...Barbie...had to accept the Moon people as allies.

On May 31, 1981, nine months after the cocaine generals' coup, almost the entire leadership of the Moon sect and their Latin American political organization Causa flew to La Paz...Along with ideological "enlightenment," the education of an anti-communist "people's army" for an "armed church" began. Around 7,000 Bolivians took part in the pre-military training.

The leader of the Moon group in Bolivia was Thomas (Tom) Ward. Barbie and the pale American Ward...were often seen together...Tom Ward was also the man who delivered a payment from the CIA in early 1981 to the Argentinean intelligence Lieutenant Alfredo Mingolla. The $1,500 monthly salary for Mingolla was paid in the Causa office belonging to William Selig, Ward's representative.

Selig put less stock in pious attitudes than his boss. He was an electronic specialist with experience in Vietnam and advised the Bolivian intelligence organization on technical matters. The third man in the CIA cadre of the Moonies was Paul Perry, who had already tried to organize an "armed church" in Brazil.

The Argentinean agent Alfredo Mingolla at first knew little about the connection between the Nazi Barbie and the Moonie Ward. Two days after his recruitment by the CIA, says Mingolla, he met the "Old German" in the courtyard of the Bolivian General Staff. Mingolla came out of department VII of the intelligence agency; Barbie came out of department III.

Barbie greeted his colleague—as Mingolla remembers it, "Hello, comrade, what do I hear? Are you working for a, new employer?" Mingolla answered with surprise, "For what, for who, then?" Barbie: `Na, for Mr. Ward, for example. Mingolla feared reproach. "Yes. Doesn't the organization allow that?" Barbie laughed. "It's okay. There has to be cooperation."

Mingolla says that it was first clear to him on that day that Barbie had become a top man for the CIA. Because only top people knew the names of the other agency employees...The Moon man Tom Ward was Klaus Barbie's CIA contact man only preceding and directly after the putsch of 1980.

Following...sanctions against the military junta...imposed in 1981...The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as clandestinely as they had arrived. Only the CIA trio of the Moonies—Ward, Selig, and Perry—stayed on for a while as advisers to the Bolivian information agency in order to assist in an orderly transition to a democratic form of government.

http://covertactionquarterly.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/CAQ25.pdf, pp. 35-36

Thanks in advance, Robert, for replying with your "take" on the Bolivian "affair", Tom Ward, ect.

'til the next,

Don Diligent

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scoobydoojedi · 6 years ago

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Kujō Clan

The Kujō Clan now refered to as the Kujō Family were a branch family of Fujiwara clan. The family was founded by Kujō Michiie. After the the Meiji Restoration, members of the Kujō clan were elevated to princedom and given the title Prince.

*Prominent People*

*Kujō Michiie* (1193–1252) was a Japanese regent in the 13th century. He was the father of Kujō Yoritsune and grandson of Kujō Kanezane (also known as Fujiwara no Kanezane). He was the father of Norizane and Yoritsune. His third son Ichijō Sanetsune was the founding father of Ichijō family, while his second son Nijō Yoshizane founded Nijō family.In 1226, Michiie managed to have his son Yoritsune appointed fourth shogun of the Kamakura shogunate.

*Kujō Yoritsune* ( 1218 –1256), also known as Fujiwara no Yoritsune, was the fourth shogun of the Kamakura shogunate of Japan. His father was kanpaku Kujō Michiie and his grandmother was a niece of Minamoto no Yoritomo. At the age of seven, in 1226, Yoritsune became Seii Taishōgun in a political deal between his father and the shogunate regent Hōjō Yoshitoki and Hōjō Masako who set him up as a puppet shogun.

*Kujō Michitaka* (1839 – 1906), son of regent Nijō Hisatada and adopted son of his brother Yukinori, was a (kuge) or Japanese court noble of the late Edo period and politician of the early Meiji era who served as a member of the House of Peers. One of his daughters, Sadako married Emperor Taishō.In the bakumatsu period, Kujō supported the Shogunate policy as one of highest courtier of the imperial court and hence lost the power at the very beginning of Meiji restoration when the annihilation of the Shogunate was announced on 1868-01-03. His right to show at the imperial court was halted. Soon later in the same year he was rehabilitated and appointed of the clan master of Fujiwara clan.During the Boshin War, he had nominal leadership of the imperial army's Northern Pacification Command , and spent the latter part of the war in northern Japan.He was elevated to princedom in 1869 as the family head of Kujō family, when the Meiji government found Kazoku peerage system

*Empress Teimei* ( 1884 – 1951) Born as *Sadako Kujō* on 25 June 1884 in Tokyo, as the fourth daughter of Duke Michitaka Kujō, head of Kujō branch of the Fujiwara clan. Her mother was Ikuko Noma.She married then-Crown Prince Yoshihito (the future Emperor Taishō) on 25 May 1900. The couple lived in the newly constructed Akasaka Palace in Tokyo, outside of the main Tokyo Imperial Palace complex. When she gave birth to a son, Prince Hirohito (the future Emperor Shōwa) in 1901, she was the first official wife of a Crown Prince or Emperor to have given birth to the official heir to the throne since 1750.

She became Empress (Kōgō) when her husband ascended to the throne on 30 July 1912. Given her husband's weak physical and mental condition, she exerted a strong influence on imperial life, and was an active patron of Japanese Red Cross Society. The relations between the Emperor and Empress were very good, as evidenced by Emperor Taishō’s lack of interest in taking concubines, thus breaking with hundreds of years of imperial tradition, and by her giving birth to four sons.

After the death of Emperor Taishō on 25 December 1926, her title became that of Dowager Empress (which means "widow of the former emperor"). She openly objected to Japan's involvement in World War II, which might have caused conflict with her son, Hirohito. From 1943, she also worked behind the scenes with her third son Prince Takamatsu to bring about the downfall of Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō. She died on 17 May 1951 at Omiya Palace in Tokyo, aged 66

*Emperor Shōwa* (1901-1989) also know as *Hirohito* our *Hirohito Kujō* He was the head of state under the Constitution of the Empire of Japan during Japan's imperial expansion, militarization, and involvement in World War II. After the war, he was not prosecuted for war crimes as many other leading government figures were, and his degree of involvement in wartime decisions remains controversial among historians. During the postwar period, he became the symbol of the new state and Japan's recovery, and by the end of his reign, Japan had emerged as the world's second largest economy.

*Extra info on Hirohito in WWII*

*These are War Crimes that are controversial and that other countries believe he order and comited*

He committed the war crime called The Rape of Nanking which killed 300,000. He ordered every Chinese war prisoner to be killed. About 200,000 women were sexually assaulted. Husbands were sometimes forced to rape their wives and daughters. A total of 10 million Chinese were forced into slavery, many were tortured and some even eaten. Many people were shot, beheaded, stabbed, burned, boiled, roasted, buried alive, and impaled. People were sometimes killed by gas, aid, military dogs and being hanged by their tongues on iron hooks. People were often used for bayonet practice. Between 4 and 10 million people in Java were forced to work by Japanese military, the majority of which died. People sometimes had their bodies sliced in half by a sword. Women were often stabbed by a bayonet or a long stick of bamboo through private parts. The Japanese disemboweled, decapitated, hacked, nailed, crucified and dismembered men. Men and women sometimes had their private parts sliced open. Thousands were frozen to death. 4 million people in Indonesia died from famine and 2 million in Vietnam. Thousands were killed by chemical attacks. About 400,000 were killed by diseases. About 580,000 were killed after being human experiments. The Sook Ching massacre killed 50,000 to 90,000 Chinese. 100,000 civilians in the Philippines died from the Manila massacre. His men said that it was easy to kill because Hirohito told them that their lives were valueless compared to himself. He told his men to kill, burn, and loot all Chinese. Over 20 million Chinese, 10 million Asians in other countries, and millions of people in World War II were killed by the Japanese.

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veale2006-blog · 6 years ago

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9/11 Cover-Up

September 11, 2001 Long but worth the read..... 9/11 was one of the most pivotal events in world history. Its impact will be felt for years to come. You owe it to yourself to go beyond the sound bites and the simplified official story. This is an extremely complicated story with numerous players and motives. The 9/11 facts here don't all make sense or fit neatly together. It's a story full of espionage, deceit, and lies. But if forces out there are tricking us, they can only succeed if we, the general public, remain ignorant and passive.

I limit my sources on this 9/11 timeline to the mainstream media. It's not that one can only trust the major media. Much of the best reporting today is coming from alternative media. Yet many people are initially very skeptical. Some of the 9/11 cover-up facts below are very hard to believe. Yet remember that each entry is reported by respected mainstream media sources and can easily be verified by clicking on the links provided to the original source. After seeing the importance of what's being hidden, you will very likely want to join in working together to build a brighter future.

America's top military leaders drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in US cities to trick the public into supporting a war against Cuba in the early 1960s. Approved in writing by the Pentagon Joint Chiefs, Operation Northwoods even proposed blowing up a US ship and hijacking planes as a false pretext for war. [ABC News, 5/1/01, Pentagon Documents]

1980s: Osama bin Laden runs a front organization for the mujaheddin–Islamic freedom fighters rebelling against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The CIA secretly backs the mujaheddin. Pakistan's Prime Minister Bhutto, understanding the ferocity of Islamic extremism, tells then President George Bush, "You are creating a Frankenstein." [MSNBC, 8/24/98, Newsweek, 10/1/01, more]

1994: Two attacks take place which involve hijacking planes to crash them into buildings, including one by an Islamic militant group. In a third attack, a lone pilot crashes a plane at the White House. Yet after Sept. 11, over and over aviation and security officials say they are shocked that terrorists could have hijacked airliners and crashed them into landmark buildings. [New York Times, 10/3/01]

1996: The Saudi Arabian government is financially supporting Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. After 9/11, the Bush Administration does nothing to confront the Saudi leadership over its support of terror organizations and its refusal to help in the investigation. [New Yorker, 10/22/01, more]

1996-1999: The CIA officer in charge of operations against Al Qaeda from Washington writes, "I speak with firsthand experience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically that during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sound intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden." [Los Angeles Times, 12/5/04]

1996-2001: Federal authorities have known for years that suspected terrorists with ties to bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the US and abroad. One convicted terrorist confessed that his planned role in a terror attack was to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. [Washington Post, 9/23/01]

1996-Sept 11, 2001: Taliban envoys repeatedly discuss turning bin Laden over, but the US wants to be handed bin Laden directly, and the Taliban want to turn him over to some third country. About 20 more meetings on giving up bin Laden take place up till 9/11, all fruitless. [Washington Post, 10/29/01]

1997: Former National Security Advisor Brzezinski publishes a book portraying Eurasia as the key to world power, and Central Asia with its vast oil reserves as the key to domination of Eurasia. He states that for the US to maintain its global primacy, it must prevent any adversary from controlling that region. He notes that because of popular resistance to US military expansionism, his ambitious strategy can't be implemented "except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." [The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives]

1998: An Oklahoma City FBI agent sends a memo warning that "large numbers of Middle Eastern males" are getting flight training and could be planning terrorist attacks. [CBS, 5/30/02] A separate CIA intelligence report asserts that Arab terrorists are planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft into the WTC (World Trade Center). [New York Times, 9/19/02, Senate Intelligence Committee, 9/18/02, more]

Aug 1998: Within minutes of each other, truck bombs blow up the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing more than 220. For some of the time that bin Laden's men were plotting to blow up the two embassies, US intelligence was tapping their phones. [Newsweek, 10/1/01]

Dec 1998: A Time magazine cover story entitled "The Hunt for Osama," reports that bin Laden may be planning his boldest move yet - a strike on Washington or possibly New York City. [Time, 12/21/98]

Late 1998-Early 2000: On at least three occasions, spies in Afghanistan report bin Laden's location. Each time, the president approves an attack. Each time, the CIA Director says the information is not reliable enough and the attack cannot go forward. [New York Times, 12/30/01, more]

Sept 1999: A US intelligence report states bin Laden and Al-Qaeda terrorists could crash an aircraft into the Pentagon. The Bush administration claims not to have heard of this report until May 2002, though it was widely shared within the government. [CNN, 5/18/02, AP, 5/18/02, Guardian, 5/19/02]

Nov 1999: The head of Australia's security services admits the Echelon global surveillance system exists. The US still denies it exists. BBC describes Echelon's power as "astounding." Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by powerful computers capable of voice recognition. They home in on key words, or patterns of messages. [BBC, 11/3/99]

Jan 2000: George Bush Sr. meets with the bin Laden family on behalf of the Carlyle Group. He also met with them in 1998. Bush's chief of staff could not remember that this meeting took place until shown a thank you note confirming the meeting. [Wall Street Journal, 9/27/01, Guardian, 10/31/01]

Summer 2000: A secret military operation named Able Danger identifies four future 9/11 hijackers, including lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, as a potential threat and members of Al Qaeda. Yet none of this is mentioned later in the 9/11 Commissions' final report. When questioned, the 9/11 commission's chief spokesman initially says that staff members briefed about Able Danger did not remember hearing anything about Atta. Days later, however, after provided detailed information, he says the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members had indeed mentioned Atta. [New York Times, 8/11/05, more]

Sept 2000: The think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) writes the blueprint for a global "Pax Americana." Written for the Bush team before the 2000 election, Rebuilding America's Defenses is a plan for maintaining global US preeminence and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. The plan shows Bush intends to take control of the Persian Gulf whether or not Saddam Hussein is in power. It advocates the transformation of the US military. But, "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbour". [BBC, 2/14/07, Sunday Herald, 9/7/02, read report, more]

2000 - 2001: The military conducts exercises simulating what the White House later says is unimaginable: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. One imagined target is the WTC. [USA Today, 4/19/04] Another is the Pentagon. [Military District of Washington (Army), 11/3/00]

Jan 2001: A flight school alerts the FAA. Hijacker Hani Hanjour lacks English and flying skills needed for his commercial pilot's license. An FAA official then sits next to him in class. The official offers a translator to help him pass, but the flight school says this is against the rules. [AP, 5/10/02] Yet despite poor flying skills, official reports later state Hanjour executes a 330 to 360 degree turn of AA Flight 77 over Washington on 9/11 in under four minutes and manages a precision hit on the Pentagon. [NY Times, 10/16/01, NTSB, 2/19/02]

Jan 2001: After the elections, US intelligence agencies are told to "back off" investigating the bin Ladens and Saudi royals. There have always been constraints on investigating Saudis. [BBC, 11/6/01, more]

Spring 2001: Military and government documents are released that seek to legitimize the use of US military force in the pursuit of oil. One article advocates presidential subterfuge in the promotion of conflict and "explicitly urge[s] painting over the US's actual reasons for warfare as a necessity for mobilizing public support for a conflict." [Sydney Morning Herald, 12/26/02, more]

May 2001: US security chiefs reject Sudan's offer to turn over voluminous files about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Sudan has made this offer repeatedly since 1995. [Guardian, 9/30/01, more]

May 2001: Secretary of State Powell gives $43 million in aid to the Taliban government. [Los Angeles Times, 5/22/01, CNN 5/17/01] This follows $113 million given in 2000. [State Dept. Fact Sheet, 12/11/01]

May 2001: The US introduces "Visa Express" program allowing any Saudi Arabian to obtain visas through their travel agent instead of appearing at a consulate in person. [US News and World Report, 12/12/01] Five hijackers use Visa Express to enter the US. [Congressional Intelligence Committee, 9/20/02]

May-Aug 2001: A number of the 9/11 hijackers make at least six trips to Las Vegas. These "fundamentalist" Muslims drink alcohol, frequent strip clubs, and smoke hashish. Some even have strippers perform lap dances for them. [San Francisco Chronicle, 10/4/01, Newsweek, 10/15/01]

June 13, 2001: Egyptian President Mubarak through his intelligence services warns the US that bin Laden's Islamic terrorist network is threatening to kill Bush and other G8 leaders at their July economic summit meeting in Italy. The terrorists plan to use a plane stuffed with explosives. [NY Times, 9/26/01]

June 28, 2001: CIA Director George J. Tenet has been "nearly frantic" with concern. A written intelligence summary for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says: "It is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." Rice will later claim that everyone was taken by complete surprise by the 9/11 attack. By late summer, one senior political appointee says, Tenet had repeated this threat "so often that people got tired of hearing it." [Washington Post, 5/17/02]

July 4-14, 2001: Bin Laden reportedly receives kidney treatment from Canadian-trained Dr. Callaway at the American Hospital in Dubai. Telephoned several times, the doctor declines to answer questions. During his stay, bin Laden allegedly is visited by one or two CIA officers. [Guardian, 11/1/01, Sydney Morning Herald, 10/31/01, Times of London, 11/1/01, UPI, 11/1/01, more]

July 10, 2001: A Phoenix FBI agent sends a memorandum warning about Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons. He suspects bin Laden's followers and recommends a national program to check visas of suspicious flight-school students. The memo is sent to two FBI counter-terrorism offices, but no action is taken. [New York Times, 5/21/02] Vice President Cheney says in May 2002 that he opposes releasing this memo to congressional leaders or to the media and public. [CNN, 5/20/02]

July 24, 2001: Larry Silverstein's $3.2 billion 99-year lease of the WTC is finalized. Silverstein hopes to win $7 billion in insurance from the destruction of the WTC towers. [NY Times, 02/16/03, Newsday, 09/25/02]

July 26, 2001: Attorney General Ashcroft stops flying commercial airlines due to a threat assessment. [CBS, 7/26/01] He later walks out of his office rather than answer questions about this. [AP, 5/16/02, more]

Late July 2001: The US and UN ignore warnings from the Taliban foreign minister that bin Laden is planning an imminent huge attack on US soil. The FBI and CIA also fail to take seriously warnings that Islamic fundamentalists have enrolled in flight schools across the US. [Independent, 9/7/02, more]

Summer 2001: Intelligence officials know that al Qaeda both hopes to use planes as weapons and seeks to strike a violent blow within the US, despite government claims following 9/11 that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks came "like bolts from the blue." [Wall Street Journal, 09/19/02, CNN, 9/12/02]

Summer 2001: Russian President Putin later says publicly that he ordered his intelligence agencies to alert the US of suicide pilots training for attacks on US targets. [Fox, 5/17/02]

Late summer 2001: Jordanian intelligence agents go to Washington to warn that a major attack is planned inside the US and that aircraft will be used. Christian Science Monitor calls the story "confidently authenticated" even though Jordan later backs away from it. [CS Monitor, 5/23/02]

Aug 5-11, 2001: Israel warns US of an imminent Al Qaeda attack. [Fox News, 5/17/02]

Aug 6, 2001: President Bush is warned by US intelligence that bin Laden might be planning to hijack commercial airliners. The White House waits eight months after 9/11 to reveal this fact. [New York Times, 5/16/02] Titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," the intelligence briefing specifically mentions the World Trade Center. Yet Bush later states the briefing "said nothing about an attack on America." [CNN, 4/12/04, Washington Post, 4/12/04,

White House, 4/11/04, CNN, 4/10/04, Intelligence Briefing, 8/6/01, more]

Aug 22, 2001: Top counter-terrorism expert John O'Neill quits the FBI due to repeated obstruction of his al-Qaeda investigations and a power play against him. He was the government's "most committed tracker of bin Laden and al-Qaeda." The next day he starts a new job as head of security at the WTC. He is killed weeks later in the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attack. [New Yorker, 1/14/02]

Aug 24, 2001: Frustrated with lack of response from FBI headquarters about detained suspect Moussaoui, the Minnesota FBI begins working with the CIA. The CIA sends alerts calling him a "suspect 747 airline suicide hijacker."

Three days later an FBI Minnesota supervisor says he is trying to make sure that Moussaoui does not "take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center." [Senate Intelligence Committee, 10/17/02] FBI headquarters chastises Minnesota FBI for notifying the CIA. [Time, 5/21/02] FBI Director Mueller will later say "there was nothing the agency could have done to anticipate and prevent the [9/11] attacks." [Senate Intelligence Committee, 9/18/02, more]

Sept 10, 2001: A particularly urgent warning may have been received the night before the attacks, causing some top Pentagon brass to cancel a trip. "Why that same information was not available to the 266 people who died aboard the four hijacked commercial aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill." [Newsweek, 9/13/01] "A group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns." [Newsweek, 9/24/01, more]

Sept 10, 2001: Former president Bush is with a brother of Osama bin Laden at a Carlyle business conference. The conference is interrupted the next day by the attacks. [Washington Post, 3/16/03]

Sept 10, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces that by some estimates the Department of Defense "cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." CBS later calculates that 25% of the yearly defense budget is unaccounted for. A defense analyst says, "The books are cooked routinely year after year." [DOD, 9/10/01, CBS, 1/29/02] This announcement was buried by the next day's news of 9/11.

Sept 11, 2001: Warren Buffett, the second richest man on Earth [BBC, 6/22/01], schedules a charity event inside Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. A small group of business leaders attend, including at least one who would otherwise have died in the WTC. [SF Business Times, 2/1/02, Forbes 10/15/01] Bush flies to this same base that day, where there is an underground command center. [CNN, 9/12/01, CBS, 9/11/02]

Sept 11, 2001: Recovery experts extract data from 32 WTC computer drives revealing a surge in financial transactions. Illegal transfers of over $100 million may have been made through some WTC computer systems immediately before and during the disaster. [Reuters, 12/18/01, CNN, 12/20/01, more]

Sept 11, 2001: In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, a US intelligence agency (the National Reconnaissance Office or NRO) was all set for an exercise at 9 AM on September 11th in which an aircraft would crash into one of its buildings near Washington, DC. [AP, 8/22/02] Four war games were also in progress at the time of the attacks. [C-SPAN Congressional Testimony, 3/11/05, more]

Sept 11, 2001: The entire continental United States is defended by only seven air bases and 14 military jets. [CNN, 9/9/03, Newsday, 9/23/01]

September 11, 2001–Timeline for the Day of the Attacks Department of Defense (6/1/01) and FAA (7/12/01) procedure: In the event of a hijacking, the FAA hijack coordinator on duty at Washington headquarters requests the military to provide escort aircraft. Normally, NORAD escort aircraft take the required action. The FAA notifies the National Military Command Center by the most expeditious means. [DOD/, 6/1/01, FAA, 7/12/01, FAA 7/12/01]

If NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) hears of any difficulties in the skies, they begin the work to scramble jet fighters [take off and intercept aircraft that are off course]. Between Sep 2000 and June 2001 fighters were scrambled 67 times. [AP, 8/12/02] When the Lear jet of golfer Payne Stewart didn't respond in 1999, F-16 interceptors were quickly dispatched. According to an Air Force timeline, a series of military planes provided an emergency escort to Payne's stricken Lear about 20 minutes after ground controllers lost contact with his plane. [Dallas Morning News, 10/26/99, more]

8:20 AM (approx.): Air traffic controllers suspect Flight 11 has been hijacked. [NY Times, 9/15/01, more]

8:40 AM: NORAD is notified of hijacking. [NY Times, 10/16/01, 8:38 AM Washington Post, 9/15/01]

8:46 AM: Flight 11 crashes into the WTC (World Trade Center) north tower. [approximately 26 minutes after controllers lost contact][New York Times, 9/12/01]

8:46 AM: President Bush later states, "I was sitting outside the classroom and I saw an airplane hit the tower. The TV was on." [CNN, 12/4/01] "When we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building." [White House, 1/5/02] There was no live coverage of the first crash on TV and President Bush was in a classroom reading with children at the time of the second crash. How could he forget this?

8:52 AM: Two F-15s take off from Otis Air Force Base. [Washington Post, 9/15/01] They go after Flight 175. Major General Paul Weaver, director of the Air National Guard, states "the pilots flew like a scalded ape, topping 500 mph but were unable to catch up to the airliner. We had a nine-minute window, and in excess of 100 miles to intercept 175,'' he said. ''There was just literally no way.'' [Dallas Morning News, 9/15/01] F-15's fly at up to 2.5 times the speed of sound [1875 mph or 30+ miles a minute or 270+ miles in nine minutes] and are designed for low-altitude, high-speed, precision attacks. [BBC]

8:56 AM: By this time, it is evident that Flight 77 is lost. The FAA, already in contact with the Pentagon about the two hijackings out of Boston, reportedly doesn't notify NORAD of this until 9:24, 28 minutes later. [see 9:10 AM for comparison, New York Times, 10/16/01]

9:03 AM: Flight 175 crashes into the south WTC tower. [23 minutes after NORAD notified, 43 minutes after air traffic control lost contact with pilots][New York Times, 9/12/01, CNN, 9/12/01]

9:10 AM: Major General Paul Weaver states Flight 77 came back on the (radar) scope at 9:10 in West Virginia. [Dallas Morning News, 9/15/01] Another report states the military was notified of Flight 77 several minutes after 9:03. [Washington Post, 9/15/01]

9:24 AM [? - see above]: The FAA, who 28 minutes earlier had discovered Flight 77 off course and heading east over West Virginia, reportedly notifies NORAD. A Pentagon spokesman says, "The Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way." [Newsday, 9/23/01, New York Times, 10/16/01] Yet since the first crash, military officials in a Pentagon command center were urgently talking to law enforcement and air traffic control officials about what to do. [New York Times, 9/15/01]

9:28 AM: Air traffic control learns that Flight 93 has been hijacked. [MSNBC, 7/30/02]

9:38 AM: Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon. [42 minutes or more after contact was lost, one hour after NORAD notification of first hijacking][New York Times, 10/16/01, 9:43 CNN, 9/12/01]

9:59 AM: The south tower of the World Trade Center collapses. [New York Times, 9/12/01]

10:10 AM: Flight 93 crashes in Pennsylvania. [42 minutes after contact was lost, 90 minutes after NORAD notification of first hijacking. What happened to sophisticated military radar systems and jet fighter scramble procedures? ][CNN, 9/12/02]

10:28 AM: The World Trade Center north tower collapses. [CNN, 9/12/01, NY Times, 9/12/01]

5:20 PM: Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapses. [CNN, 9/12/01] Though the media claims fires brought the building down, the building's owner Larry Silverstein later recounts the story of the collapse of this 47-story skyscraper in a PBS documentary America Rebuilds, "I remember getting a call from the fire department commander. ... I said ... maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it. And they made that decision to pull, and then we watched the building collapse." [PBS Documentary, more]

Sept 11, 2001: Did the Air Force send up planes after the hijacked aircraft? The Air Force won't say. It says they keep about 20 F-15 and F-16 fighters on duty with Air National Guards along the nation's coastline, ready to inspect unknown aircraft entering U.S. airspace. "We can scramble and be airborne in a matter of minutes," said an Air Force spokesperson. Some airline pilots are wondering whether the FAA did enough to try to prevent the crashes. [Wall Street Journal, 09/14/01]

Sept 11, 2001: Six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners make a tape recording describing the events, but the tape is later destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it. [Washington Post, 5/6/04, New York Times, 5/6/04]

Sept 11, 2001: Hours after the attacks, a "shadow government" is formed. Key congressional leaders say they didn't know President Bush had established this government-in-waiting. Some Congressmen state the administration should have conferred about its plans. [CBS, 3/2/02, Washington Post, 3/2/02, more]

Sept 11, 2001: A National Public Radio correspondent states: "I spoke with Congressman Ike Skelton who said that just recently the director of the CIA warned that there could be an attack - an imminent attack - on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected." [NPR, 9/11/01]

Sept 12, 2001: Senator Orrin Hatch says the US was monitoring bin Laden supporters and overheard them discussing the attack. [AP, 9/12/01] Why has the media not explored the fact that the US could monitor private communications of al-Qaeda on 9/11?

Sept 13-19, 2001: Members of bin Laden's family are driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret assemblypoint in Texas and then to Washington, where they leave the country on a private plane when most flights were still grounded. Top White House officials personally approve these evacuations. [New York Times, 9/4/03, Boston Globe, 9/20/01, New York Times, 9/30/01, more]

Sept 14, 2001: The two black boxes for Flight 77 are found. [PBS, 9/14/01] FBI Director Robert Mueller later says Flight 77's data recorder provides altitude, speed, headings and other information, but the voice recorder contains "nothing useful." [CBS, 2/23/02] Yet they refuse to release the recordings.

Sept 15-16, 2001: U.S. military sources give the FBI information that several of the 9/11 hijackers, including leader Mohamed Atta, may have received training at U.S. military installations. Three hijackers listed their address on drivers licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla. Atta graduated from the US International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The media drops the story after the Air Force issues a statement saying that while the names are similar, "we are probably not talking about the same people."

[Newsweek, 9/15/01, Washington Post, 9/16/01, Los Angeles Times, 9/15/01, more] Yet the military provides no detailed information to refute the claims in these articles.

Sept 19, 2001: The FBI claims that there may have been six hijacking teams on the morning of 9/11. [New York Times, 9/19/01] Authorities have identified teams that total as many as 50 infiltrators who supported or carried out the strikes. About 40 of the men have been accounted for. [Los Angeles Times, 9/13/01] Yet only one person, Moussaoui, is later charged.

Sept 20-23, 2001: "Five of the alleged hijackers have emerged, alive, innocent and astonished to see their names and photographs appearing on satellite television. ... The hijackers were using stolen identities, and investigators are studying the possibility that the entire suicide squad consisted of impostors." [quote from London Times, 9/20/01, see also BBC]. Yet these same individuals are later officially established as the 9/11 hijackers in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report. For more on this, click here.

Oct 2, 2001: The Patriot Act is introduced in Congress. The next day, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D) accuses the Bush administration of reneging on an agreement on this anti-terrorist bill. [Washington Post, 10/4/01] Anthrax letters are sent to Leahy and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D) on October 9. [CNN, 11/18/01]

Oct 10-11, 2001: After consulting with the FBI and CDC, Iowa State University in Ames destroys anthrax spores collected over seven decades. On Oct 25, the White House homeland security director confirms publicly the anthrax letters sent to Leahy and others contained the Ames strain. [New York Times, 11/9/01]

Nov 12, 2001–Mar 25, 2002: 13 renowned microbiologists mysteriously die over the span of less than five months. All but one are killed or murdered under unusual circumstances. Some are world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others are the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of biological weapons. Still others are experts in the theory of bioterrorism. [Globe and Mail, 5/4/02]

Nov 12: Benito Que, 52, an expert in infectious diseases–killed in carjacking, later deemed possible stroke. [Globe and Mail, 5/4/02] Nov. 16: Don Wiley, 57, one of the world's leading researchers of deadly viruses–body found in Mississippi River. [CNN, 12/22/01]

Nov 21: Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, 64, an expert in adapting germs and viruses for military use–stroke. [New York Times, 11/23/01] Dec 10: Dr. Robert Schwartz, 57, a leading researcher on DNA sequencing analysis–slain at home. Washington Post, 12/12/01]

Dec 14: Nguyen Van Set, 44, his research organization had just come to fame for discovering a virus which can be modified to affect smallpox–dies in an airlock in his lab. [Sydney Morning Herald, 12/12/01]

Jan 2002: Ivan Glebov (bandit attack) and Alexi Brushlinski (killed in Moscow), both world-renowned members of the Russian Academy of Science. [Pravda, 2/9/02]

Feb 9: Victor Korshunov, 56, head of the microbiology sub-faculty at the Russian State Medical University–killed by cranial injury. [Pravda, 2/9/02] Feb 11: Ian Langford, 40, one of Europe's leading experts on environmental risk–murdered in home. [London Times, 2/13/02]

Feb 28 (2): Tanya Holzmayer, 46, helped create drugs that interfere with replication of the virus that causes AIDS, and Guyang Huang, 38, a brilliant scholar highly regarded in genetics–murder/suicide. [San Jose Mercury News, 2/28/02]

Mar 24: David Wynn-Williams, 55, an astrobiologist with NASA Ames Research Center–killed while jogging. [London imes, 3/27/02]

Mar 25: Steven Mostow, 63, an expert on the threat of bioterrorism–private plane crash. [KUSA TV/NBC, 3/26/02]

Dec 2001: The US engineers the rise to power of a former Unocal Oil employee, Hamid Karzai, as the interim president of Afghanistan. Looking at the map of the big US bases in Afghanistan, one is struck that they are identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline. [Chicago Tribune, 3/18/02, more]

Dec 25, 2001: Leading structural engineers and fire-safety experts believe the investigation into the collapse of the WTC is "inadequate." They note that the current team of 20 or so investigators has inadequate financial and staff support, has been prevented from interviewing witnesses and from examining the disaster site. They couldn't even get detailed blueprints of the World Trade Center. The decision to rapidly recycle the steel beams from the WTC means definitive answers may never be known. [New York Times, 12/25/01]

Jan 1, 2002: Zalamy Khalilzad is appointed by Bush as special envoy to Afghanistan. [BBC, 1/1/02, Chicago Tribune, 3/18/02] Khalilzad once lobbied for the Taliban and worked for an American oil company that sought concessions for pipelines in Afghanistan. [Independent, 1/10/02]

Jan 4, 2002: An editorial in the respected trade magazine Fire Engineering states that there is good reason to believe that the "official investigation," blessed by FEMA, into the WTC collapse is a "half-baked farce" that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests are clearly not full disclosure.

"Respected members of the fire protection engineering community are beginning to raise red flags, and a resonating theory has emerged: The structural damage from the planes and the explosive ignition of jet fuel in themselves were not enough to bring down the towers." [Fire Engineering, 1/02]

Jan 24, 2002: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle claims that on this day Cheney calls him and urges that no 9/11 inquiry be made. He is repeatedly pressured thereafter. [CNN, 1/29/02, Newsweek, 2/4/02, more]

Feb 6, 2002: CIA Director Tenet tells a Senate hearing that there was no 9/11 intelligence failure. When asked about the CIA on 9/11, he states that the 9/11 plot was "in the heads of three or four people." He rejects any suggestion that the CIA failed to do its job. [USA Today, 2/7/02]

Feb 21, 2002: A ban on poppy growing by the Taliban in July 2000 along with severe droughts reduced Afghanistan's opium yield by 91% in 2001. Yet the UN expects its 2002 opium crop to be equivalent to the bumper one of threeyears ago. Afghanistan is the source of 75% of the world's heroin. [Guardian, 2/21/02] Why is the US unable to control opium production which had almost stopped?

Mar 2, 2002: The 9/11 collapse of the 47-story WTC building 7 was the first time a modern, steel-reinforced high-rise in the US has ever collapsed in a fire. [New York Times, 3/2/02] Building 7 was where the SEC was storing files related to numerous Wall Street investigations. The files for approximately 3,000 to 4,000 cases were destroyed. [National Law Journal, 9/17/01] Lost files include documents that could show the relationship between Citigroup and the WorldCom bankruptcy. [The Street, 8/9/02, more]

Mar 13, 2002: Bush says of bin Laden: "I truly am not that concerned about him." [White House, 3/13/02] Military chief Myers states: "the goal has never been to get bin Laden." [CNN/DOD, 4/6/02]

Apr 19, 2002: FBI Director Mueller: "We have not uncovered a single piece of paper that mentioned any aspect of the 9/11 plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind." [FBI, 4/19/02, Los Angeles Times, 4/30/02] Yet investigators have amassed a ''substantial'' amount of e-mail traffic among the hijackers. [USA Today, 10/1/01] The laptop computer of Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker, was confiscated weeks before 9/11, yet FBI headquarters systematically dismissed and undermined requests by Minneapolis FBI agents to search the computer. [Time, 5/21/02, CNN, 5/27/02]

May 15, 2002: For the first time, the White House admits that Bush was warned about bin Laden hijacking aircraft and wanting to attack the US in Aug 2001. It is unclear why they waited eight months to reveal this. The Press Secretary states that while Bush had been warned of possible hijackings, "the president did not receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers." Yet the August presidential memo left little doubt that the hijacked airliners were intended for use as missiles and that US targets were intended. [New York Times, 5/16/02, Washington Post, 5/16/02, Guardian, 5/19/02]

May 17, 2002: Dan Rather says that he and other journalists haven't been properly investigating since 9/11. He graphically describes the pressures to conform after the attacks. [Guardian, 5/17/02, more]

May 21, 2002: A memo is released in which Minnesota FBI agent Coleen Rowley writes to FBI Director Mueller, "I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring." [Time, 5/21/02] CNN calls the memo a "colossal indictment of our chief law-enforcement agency." [CNN, 5/27/02] Time magazine later names Rowley one of three "Persons of the Year" for 2002. [Time, 12/22/02]

May 23, 2002: President Bush says he is opposed to establishing a special, independent commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before 9/11. [CBS, 5/23/02]

May 30, 2002: FBI Agent Robert Wright formally accuses the FBI of deliberately curtailing investigations that might have prevented 9/11. He is under threat of retribution if he talks to members of Congress about what he knows. [Fox News/Reuters, 5/30/02, more] He also accuses the agency of shutting down his 1998 criminal probe into alleged terrorist-training camps in Chicago and Kansas City. Wright has written a book, but the agency won't let him publish it or even give it to anyone. [LA Weekly, 8/2/02]

July 23, 2002: The New York City government decides that many of the audio and written records of the Fire Department's actions on 9/11 should never be released. The New York Times had filed a lawsuit seeking numerous records concerning the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, including firsthand accounts by scores of firefighters and chiefs. [New York Times, 7/23/02]

Sept 11, 2002: On the first anniversary of 9/11, New York Times writes, "One year later, the public knows less about the circumstances of 2,801 deaths at the foot of Manhattan in broad daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic." The former police commissioner of Philadelphia says: "You can hardly point to a cataclysmic event in our history when a blue-ribbon panel did not set out to establish the facts and suggest reforms. That has not happened here." [New York Times, 9/11/02]

Oct 5, 2002: Congressional investigators say the FBI's efforts to block their inquiry makes them skeptical of FBI assertions. They also say the Justice Department has joined the FBI in fighting congressional requests for information, while the CIA has been antagonistic. [New York Times, 10/5/02]

Oct 16, 2002: The CIA, FBI, and NSA all testify that no individual at their agencies has been punished or fired for any of the missteps surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. [Washington Post, 10/18/02]

Oct 21, 2002: No more than six of the 19 hijackers were interviewed by US officials before being granted visas.

This contradicts the State Department's claim that 12 had been interviewed. Of 15 hijackers, none filled in the visa documents properly. All 15 of them should have been denied entry to the country. "The system was rigged in their favor from the get-go." [Washington Post, 10/22/02, ABC News, 10/23/02] In December 2002, two top Republican senators report that if State Department personnel had merely followed the law in Saudi Arabia, 9/11 would not have happened. [AP, 12/18/02, more]

Oct 27, 2002: A report from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's Defense Science Board recommends the creation of a super-intelligence body (P2OG) which would launch secret operations to "stimulate reactions" among terrorists and states owning weapons of mass destruction. It would prod terrorist cells into action, thus exposing them to quick-response attacks by US forces. [Los Angeles Times, 10/27/02, more]

Oct 29, 2002: Of over 800 people rounded up since 9/11, only 10 have been linked to the hijackings and probably will turn out to be innocent. [Newsweek, 10/29/02] Though many were held for months, the vast majority were never charged with anything other than overstaying a visa. [New York Times, 7/11/02]

Nov 27, 2002: Bush names Henry Kissinger to lead an independent investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks. [New York Times, 11/28/02] He is a highly controversial figure. Documents released by the CIA strengthen suspicions that Kissinger was actively involved in a covert plan to assassinate thousands of political opponents in six Latin American countries. He is also famous for his obsession with secrecy. [BBC, 4/26/02] "Indeed, it is tempting to wonder if the choice of Mr. Kissinger is not a clever maneuver by the White House to contain an investigation it long opposed." [New York Times, 11/29/02]

Dec 13, 2002: Kissinger resigns as chairman of the new 9/11 investigation citing controversy over potential conflicts of interest with his business clients. [CNN, 12/13/02, BBC, 12/14/02]

Dec 16, 2002: Bush replaces Kissinger with Thomas Kean as chairman. Kean promises a thorough investigation. [AP, 12/17/02] He will devote one day a week to the commission. [Washington Post, 12/17/02]

Jan 13, 2003: The worldwide turmoil caused by US government policies goes not exactly unreported, but entirely de-emphasized. Guardian writers are inundated by e-mails from Americans asking why their own papers never print what is in UK papers. If there is a Watergate scandal lurking in this administration, it is unlikely to be [Washington Post's Bob] Woodward or his colleagues who will tell us about it. If it emerges, it will probably come out on the web. "That is a devastating indictment of the state of American newspapers." [Guardian, 1/13/03]

March 26, 2003: Though the investigation into the space shuttle Columbia tragedy cost $50 million and the Ken Starr investigation of Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky ran $64 million, the White House balks at increasing funding beyond $3 million for the 9/11 Commission's investigation into the worst terror attack ever. The latest effort to curtail funding has angered victims of the attacks. "The White House decision was another in a long line of efforts to water down or shrink the panel's role." [Time, 3/26/03, MSNBC, 9/20/06]

July 22, 2004: The 9/11 Commission Report is published. It fails to mention that a year before the 9/11 attacks, a secret Pentagon project named Able Danger had identified four 9/11 hijackers, including leader Mohamed Atta. The Commission spokesperson initially states members were not informed of this, but later acknowledges they were. [New York Times, 8/11/05, more] The report also completely fails to investigate the collapse of WTC 7.

Nov 19, 2004: The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is becoming a reality. Afghanistan has surpassed Colombia as the world's biggest gross producer of illicit narcotics, heroin being the "main engine of economic growth" and the "strongest bond" among tribes that previously fought constantly. What we have here now is a narco-economy where 40 to 50 percent of the GDP is from illicit drugs. [San Francisco Chronicle, 11/19/04] How does a country controlled by the US become the largest producer of illegal drugs? For a possible answer, click here.

Nov 17, 2005: Former FBI Director Louis Freeh: "The Able Danger intelligence, if confirmed, is undoubtedly the most relevant fact of the entire post-9/11 inquiry. Yet the 9/11 Commission inexplicably concluded that it 'was not historically significant.' This astounding conclusion—in combination with the failure to investigate Able Danger ... raises serious challenges to the commission's credibility and, if the facts prove out, might just render the commission historically insignificant itself." [Wall Street Journal, 11/17/05, more]

2004 - 2005: A growing number of top government officials and public leaders express disbelief in the official story of 9/11. Some even believe 9/11 may have been an inside job. 100 prominent leaders and forty 9/11 family members sign a statement calling for an unbiased inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the attacks to occur. [Various Publications]

August 9, 2006: A shocking new book by the 9/11 Commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton says we still don't know the whole truth about 9/11. The book outlines repeated misstatements by the Pentagon and the FAA. Untrue–the military's original timeline of United Flight 93. Equally untrue, the government's timeline for American Flight 77 and details about fighter jets scrambled to intercept it. CNN News anchor Lou Dobbs: "The fact that the government would permit deception ... and perpetuate the lie suggests that we need a full investigation of what is going on." [CNN, 8/9/06 , MSNBC/AP, 8/4/06, more]

2006-2014: Over 50 senior government officials from the military, intelligence, Cabinet and Congress, and over 100 highly respected professors, including engineers, physicists, architects, philosophers and theologians publicly criticize The 9/11 Commission Report as flawed, and call for a new, independent investigation. Over 2,000 architects and engineers have created a website calling for a new investigation. Some even claim rogue elements of government were involved in the attacks. [Officials, Professors, Architects and Engineers]

Mysterious Deaths of 9 11 Witnesses (MUST SEE) - THESE ARE NOT COINCIDENCES https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suQitX2GmTU

Conclusive Evidence the 9/11 Planes were NOT REAL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUoqwUVOxHE&feature=youtu.be

AWAKENING - 9/11 Cover Up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNZ90uNvrYI

This is the 9/11 Cover Up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkd0C2t2s8

The Secret History of 9/11 - Full Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVh9WgGxuIY

The Truth Behind 9-11 Attack [Part 1 of 9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arub097L5Co

9/11 False Flag Conspiracy - Finally Solved (Names, Connections, Motives)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAAztWC5sT8

9/11 FALSE FLAG Of the horrific attacks that took place that day, there are seemingly endless postulations and conspiracies as to what really went on. Millions of dollars of United and American Airlines “put-option” stocks were traded in the week leading up to the attack. There were blatant business ties between the Bush family and Osama bin Laden. Only one flight was allowed in the air after the attacks, flying 140 Saudi nationals home to safety. And these are just a few of the conspicuous events tied to that day.

But the use of those events as justification to go to war, ostensibly makes 9/11 a false flag event used as an imperialist grab of oil reserves, miring us in an endless conflict with no light at the end of the tunnel. Terrorism persists, Operation Iraqi Freedom created a bigger monster in ISIS, and the situation in Afghanistan is still a quagmire. But the truth behind the events of that day still remain shrouded by government cover-ups and harsh ridicule of those who dare to question that narrative. All the elements of the events that have transpired since that day are the classic building blocks of a false flag operation. And a majority of Americans believe the government is concealing information about 9/11, while 15 percent believe the towers were brought down in a controlled demolition.

Pray for the families that lost their love ones from such a senseless evil act of life. We must hold those that let this happen accountable!!!

May Yeshua the Messiah bless you, Love, Debbie

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how2to18 · 6 years ago

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TRAVIS JEPPESEN HAS been publishing inventive fiction since his early 20s, and writes about art all over the globe for Artforum, Art in America, and a slew of other magazines. His new nonfiction book, See You Again in Pyongyang, chronicles both his personal experiences as a tourist in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and his ambivalent relationship with it as a writer and analyst of culture. After accepting an invitation to accompany his friend, travel writer Tom Masters, to the country several years ago, he has since traveled there four additional times and written extensively about its art and architecture. In 2016, Jeppesen became the first American to ever complete a university program in North Korea, having participated in a month-long intensive Korean language course. That experience, which gave him unprecedented access for an American to the culture and daily life of Pyongyang residents, as well as to other parts of the country on supervised excursions, make up the bulk of the new book.

See You Again in Pyongyang dramatizes a meeting point between an intellect with a passion for getting lost in other cities and landscapes, and an environment that by its very design forbids such a sensibility from ever gaining foothold. What ensues is not a polemic, but rather a romance of antitheses. Jeppesen ultimately accepts this lack of resolution, processing his relationship with the country through a combination of memoir, historical background, and the bringing to light of others’ stories that our own ideologically biased media seldom care to find for themselves.

BEN SHIELDS: Your first novel, Victims, is largely about an apocalyptic cult. In See You Again in Pyongyang, you look past a lot of the clichés that we have about North Korea and their society, but there’s no escaping its cult-like quality. Have cults and cults of personality been lifelong intellectual fascinations for you?

TRAVIS JEPPESEN: It’s safe to say that. And extreme forms of belief and ideology in general. I kind of despise all forms of ideology, but I’m fascinated by the way that people either fall into it, or it can be imposed on them from without. It usually is some toxic combination of the two. I think it threads its way through all of my writing.

I was really interested in the differences you outline between Soviet, Chinese, and Korean communism, especially with regard to Confucianism’s lingering influence. In the Soviet Union, the cult of personality got out of hand, to the point where Stalin at times tried to rein it back. In your view, which is more essential in the Korean system: the propaganda for the party, socialism, and the ideal society, or the deification of the marshal?

I think Kim Jong-il’s contribution to the development of the system was making the party one and the same with the leader. The party is the mother, and the leader the father. You need both to nurture you. The development toward the deification of the leadership came about as a result of Stalin being a big role model for Kim Il-sung. But also because there were these different factions of communists who arrived to establish the early North Korean state. There was a lot of competition between the factions, so it was a way for Kim Il-sung to put an end to that. That kind of extreme despotism — deification — really is an imposition of fear on the populace, because he eliminated all of his enemies one by one. That’s very much how the system evolved and how it became what it is today.

Obviously I have to ask this: what do you make of the North and South Korean peace talks, the looming Trump-Kim summit, and the call in some quarters for Trump to win the Nobel?

I hate to say it, but I think Kim Jong-un is the one who has kind of engineered all this, whether or not you agree with his methods. He did it by terrorizing the world for much of the last year. But look, I think what’s happening is really a great thing. It looks like they’re going to announce an official end to the Korean War, which is amazing for people on both sides of the divide. Let us not forget that the North Koreans have also been living under the threat of nuclear annihilation for decades now. We love to say in the Western media how flippant and manipulative they are and how they never stick to any of the agreements that they sign. But it was actually the United States who first violated the armistice agreement they signed by installing nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula in 1958. Nobody talks about that in the Western media.

I had no idea before reading your book that that was the case.

Yeah, very few people are aware of this. This is not to defend the regime, because of course I think it’s terrible. But fact is fact. They have been putting up for years with these military exercises on their border conducted by the United States and South Korea. The United States would never put up with that, an enemy nation conducting military exercises on their borders. But the North Koreans have had to sit and watch that with their binoculars year after year after year. They’re a really small, weak, kind of powerless nation. They did what they had to do by developing these nuclear weapons.

You blame a lot of what’s happened in North Korea recently on President Bush’s aggression toward them, which makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, Trump has been more aggressive, at least in his rhetoric, than any president ever toward the DPRK. Why, then, do you think that peace talks and at least the promise to denuclearize are happening now?

A lot of it has to do with the increase of sanctions. Kim Jong-un’s policy for the last few years has been known as the byungjin policy, which is the simultaneous development of both the military and the economy. There’s this whole class of rich people that didn’t really exist before. [Jong-un] is protecting them, and they’re protecting him. It’s kind of a two-way street. Were a horrible financial crisis to happen again in North Korea, it could be potentially disastrous internally for his regime. And some experts say that, yeah, the North Koreans are kind of scared shitless of Trump because his rhetoric has been so wild. It’s weird because I obviously am not a big Trump supporter. I think he’s a sociopath more than anything. But having said that, if he does manage to normalize diplomatic relations with North Korea, he’ll have done something really amazing that no US president has done. The South Koreans are being very coy. [President] Moon Jae-in is being all like, “Oh, it’s all because of Trump.” He knows how susceptible to flattery Trump is. The United States and South Korean economies are so intertwined that if Trump flippantly tries to turn against the South Koreans, it could completely bungle the whole process. Just as Moon Jae-in is using flattery as a means, I think we can probably expect the North Koreans to do something quite similar. And it could lead to very good things.

You include in the book a powerful story of a North Korean defector in the South, whom you call Un Ju, who left her home city of Wonsan at the age of 18 to follow her mother to the South. How were you able to connect with as many defectors as you did?

When I was in Seoul, I volunteered with an organization called Teach North Korean Refugees. But they’re rather strict. They say at the outset, if you volunteer with us you can’t use this to do outside research. I had other ways. Un Ju was a friend of a friend, the filmmaker Kim Kyung-Mook, a South Korean queer filmmaker. Two of his roommates had been North Korean defectors, which is highly unusual. Mook is certainly very different. He’s a great artist and is a person of great powers of empathy. He introduced me to Un Ju. It was great talking to her because I felt like a lot of the North Korean defectors one encounters, especially in the media, go through almost this reverse brainwashing process where they can only say bad things about North Korea. She actually had a lot of good things to say about North Korea and a lot of bad things to say about her experiences in the South. I wanted to show that this isn’t such a black-and-white issue the way that mainstream media makes it out to be.

Near the end of the book there’s this rather awkward exchange between Comrade Kim, your friend from the Korean State Travel Company, and one of the other guys on the program, Alexandre. Kim, with some suspicion, essentially asks, “Why are you so interested in our country? What is all of this to you?” Yet you are sitting right there, not being asked the same question. Why do you think you didn’t get that feedback from him?

Alexandre is kind of freaking out because he feels like he hasn’t been able to pierce below the surface. He wants to come back on a student visa, not on a tourist, because then he’ll be able to do things, then he’ll be able to go somewhere without a guide. Maybe then he can find the answer. But the whole point that I kind of reach is, no, this is what it is. You’re not going to see anything that we haven’t seen, basically. It’s this kind of Zen moment that I reach that allows me to sit back detachedly and observe what’s going on there in that scene. Alexandre comes from this classic liberal arts tradition. “Oh, I’m interested in North Korea because I want to expand the limits of myself and learn a new language. I’m in the midst of my education, so I’m discovering myself!” This concept is completely foreign to them. They don’t have the language to understand it. So that scene was a showdown between two universes of perception, really.

Also toward the end, you talk about that feeling of not belonging to a society just as you’re about to leave it. In my experience that often happens after extended stays, where it feels like you’ve gotten lost, but the last three or four days you realize it’s at least partly a fantasy. That can be a painful feeling if you’ve fallen in love with another society or culture. But North Korea is not a conventional place to develop an attachment. What specific emotions accompany the realization of not belonging in the DPRK?

One of the underlying themes of this book is, what are the limits of empathy? To what extent can we identify or have an empathetic identification with the Other? For one thing, their ideology is so race-based, which means I could never belong there. But I developed a certain affection for the people that deepened as my understanding of the society and how things function deepened. The book ends with these open-ended questions like, what is love? What is empathy? This sort of identification with someone who believes in something so highly bizarre and so specific — is it possible? To what extent do any of them really believe in this ideology and to what extent is it forced on them? I think art should ask these kinds of questions rather than just providing a list of hypothetical answers.

In one of the early scenes, you’re at the window of your hotel room in Pyongyang, contemplating your affection for the city, which has grown and accumulated at that point over four visits. Intellectual interest in a society cannot fully explain one’s attachment to it. Have you thought about why North Korea has become so personally significant to you, beyond merely a subject of study?

It’s my spiritual homeland — my soul is the gulag! Just kidding. I don’t know. I think this is why I kept going back and why I wrote the book. It’s an attempt to answer that question. I like to be free and be able to wander the streets of a strange city and have the classic romantic experience. But when I go there it’s kind of like putting yourself into prison and trying to recreate that experience in the outside world. I think what’s drawn me to it is its ineffability and the fact that it’s a mystery, an enigma, something I can never quite unravel. It’s the same reason I’ve fallen in love with people over the years whom I can’t figure out and who are very mysterious to me. There’s this lingering mystery that keeps me drawn to them. It’s an affliction when it happens.

Yes, it’s like a disease.

I’m a diseased mind. I fully embrace that.

Ben Shields is a Brooklyn-based writer who has written for the Paris Review, Bookforum, and other magazines.

Author image by Jason Harrell.

Banner image by (stephan).

The post Pyongyang Torch Song appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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jasonheart1 · 6 years ago

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Security troops at Wyoming nuclear base took LSD

WASHINGTON (AP) — One airman said he felt paranoia. Another marveled at the vibrant colors. A third admitted, "I absolutely just loved altering my mind."

Meet service members entrusted with guarding nuclear missiles that are among the most powerful in America's arsenal. Air Force records obtained by The Associated Press show they bought, distributed and used the hallucinogen LSD and other mind-altering illegal drugs as part of a ring that operated undetected for months on a highly secure military base in Wyoming. After investigators closed in, one airman deserted to Mexico.

"Although this sounds like something from a movie, it isn't," said Capt. Charles Grimsley, the lead prosecutor of one of several courts martial.

A slipup on social media by one airman enabled investigators to crack the drug ring at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in March 2016, details of which are reported here for the first time. Fourteen airmen were disciplined. Six of them were convicted in courts martial of LSD use or distribution or both.

None of the airmen was accused of using drugs on duty. Yet it's another blow to the reputation of the Air Force's nuclear missile corps, which is capable of unleashing hell in the form of Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. The corps has struggled at times with misbehavior, mismanagement and low morale.

Although seen by some as a backwater of the U.S. military, the missile force has returned to the spotlight as President Donald Trump has called for strengthening U.S. nuclear firepower and exchanged threats last year with North Korea. The administration's nuclear strategy calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending in coming decades.

The service members accused of involvement in the LSD ring were from the 90th Missile Wing, which operates one-third of the 400 Minuteman 3 missiles that stand "on alert" 24/7 in underground silos scattered across the northern Great Plains.

Documents obtained by the AP over the past two years through the Freedom of Information Act tell a sordid tale of off-duty use of LSD, cocaine and other drugs in 2015 and 2016 by airmen who were supposed to be held to strict behavioral standards because of their role in securing the weapons.

"It's another black eye for the Air Force — for the ICBM force in particular," says Stephen Schwartz, an independent consultant and nuclear expert.

In response to AP inquiries, an Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Uriah L. Orland, said the drug activity took place during off-duty hours. "There are multiple checks to ensure airmen who report for duty are not under the influence of alcohol or drugs and are able to execute the mission safely, securely and effectively," he said.

Airman 1st Class Tommy N. Ashworth was among those who used LSD supplied by colleagues with connections to civilian drug dealers.

"I felt paranoia, panic" for hours after taking a hit of acid, Ashworth said under oath at his court martial. He confessed to using LSD three times while off duty. The first time, in the summer of 2015, shook him up. "I didn't know if I was going to die that night or not," he said as a witness at another airman's drug trial. Recalling another episode with LSD, he said it felt "almost as if I was going to have like a heart attack or a heat stroke."

Airman Basic Kyle S. Morrison acknowledged at his court martial that under the influence of LSD he could not have responded if recalled to duty in a nuclear security emergency.

In prosecuting the cases at F.E. Warren, the Air Force asserted that LSD users can experience "profound effects" from even small amounts. It said common psychological effects include "paranoia, fear and panic, unwanted and overwhelming feelings, unwanted life-changing spiritual experiences, and flashbacks."

It's unclear how long before being on duty any of the airmen had taken LSD, which stands for lysergic acid diethylamide. The drug became popularized as "acid" in the 1960s, and views since then have been widely split on its mental health risks. Although illegal in the U.S., it had been showing up so infrequently in drug tests across the military that in December 2006 the Pentagon eliminated LSD screening from standard drug-testing procedures. An internal Pentagon memo at the time said that over the previous three years only four positive specimens had been identified in 2.1 million specimens screened for LSD.

Yet Air Force investigators found those implicated in the F.E. Warren drug ring used LSD on base and off, at least twice at outdoor gatherings. Some also snorted cocaine and used ecstasy. Civilians joined them in the LSD use, including some who had recently left Air Force service, according to two officials with knowledge of the investigation. The Air Force declined to discuss this.

Airman 1st Class Nickolos A. Harris, said to be the leader of the drug ring, testified that he had no trouble getting LSD and other drugs from civilian sources. He pleaded guilty to using and distributing LSD and using ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana.

He acknowledged using LSD eight times and distributing LSD multiple times to fellow airmen at parties in Denver and other locations from spring 2015 to early 2016.

"I absolutely just loved altering my mind," he told the military judge, blaming his decisions to use hallucinogens and other drugs on his addictive personality.

Other airmen testified that it was easy to obtain LSD in a liquid form spread on small tabs of perforated white paper. Airmen ingested at least one tab by placing it on their tongue. In one episode summarized by a military judge at Harris' court martial, he and other airmen watched YouTube videos and "then went longboarding on the streets of Denver while high on LSD."

Harris was sentenced to 12 months in jail and other penalties, but under a pretrial agreement he avoided a punitive discharge. The lead prosecutor in that case, Air Force Capt. C. Rhodes Berry, had argued Harris should be locked up for 42 months, including nine months for the "aggravating circumstance" of undercutting public trust by using hallucinogens and other drugs on a nuclear weapons base.

"I cannot think of anything more aggravating than being the ringleader of a drug ring on F.E. Warren Air Force Base," Berry said at the courts martial.

In all, the AP obtained transcripts of seven courts martial proceedings, plus related documents. They provide vivid descriptions of LSD trips.

"I'm dying!" one airman is quoted as exclaiming, followed by "When is this going to end?" during a "bad trip" on LSD in February 2016 at Curt Gowdy State Park, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west of Cheyenne, where F.E. Warren is located. A portion of that episode was video-recorded by one member of the group; a transcript of the audio was included in court records.

Others said they enjoyed the drug.

"Minutes felt like hours, colors seemed more vibrant and clear," Morrison testified. "In general, I felt more alive." He said he had used LSD in high school, which could have disqualified him from Air Force service; he said that his recruiter told him he should lie about it and that lying about prior drug use was "normal" in the Air Force.

At his court martial, Morrison acknowledged distributing LSD on the missile base in February 2016. A month later, when summoned for questioning by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Morrison confessed and became an informant for the agency, an arrangement the Air Force said yielded legally admissible evidence against 10 other airmen. Under a pretrial agreement, he agreed to testify against other airmen and avoided a punitive discharge. He was sentenced to five months' confinement, 15 days of hard labor and loss of $5,200 in pay.

Most of the airmen involved were members of two related security units at F.E. Warren — the 790th Missile Security Forces Squadron and the 90th Security Forces Squadron. Together, they are responsible for the security and defense of the nuclear weapons there as well as the missile complex.

By coincidence, the No. 2 Pentagon official at the time, Robert Work, visited F.E. Warren one month before the drug investigation became public. Accompanied by an AP reporter, he watched as airmen of the 790th Missile Security Forces Squadron — whose members at the time included Harris, the accused leader of the drug ring — demonstrated how they would force their way into and regain control of a captured missile silo.

Work, the deputy defense secretary, was there to assess progress in fixing problems in the ICBM force identified by then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who ordered an investigation after the AP reported on personnel, resource, training and leadership problems in 2013-14. Those problems included the firing of the general in charge of the entire ICBM force for inappropriate behavior the Air Force said was linked to alcohol abuse. A month later the AP revealed that an unpublished study prepared for the Air Force found "burnout" among nuclear missile launch officers and evidence of broader behavioral problems, including sexual assaults and domestic violence. Air Force officials say the force has since rebounded.

In an interview, Work said he was not aware during his visit that anything was amiss. Nor was he briefed later on the investigation. He said he wouldn't have expected to be briefed unless the Air Force found that LSD or other illegal drugs were a "systemic problem" for the nuclear force, beyond the security forces group at F.E. Warren.

Work said he had never heard of LSD use anywhere in the nuclear workforce.

For the inexperienced members of the drug ring, Harris, the ringleader, had set out several "rules" for LSD use at a gathering of several airmen in a Cheyenne apartment in late 2015 that was recorded on video. Rule No. 1: "No social media at all." He added: "No bad trips. Everybody's happy right now. Let's keep it that way."

But social media proved their undoing. In March 2016, one member posted a Snapchat video of himself smoking marijuana, setting Air Force investigators on their trail.

As the investigators closed in, one of the accused, Airman 1st Class Devin R. Hagarty, grabbed a backpack and cash, text-messaged his mother that he loved her, turned off his cellphone and fled to Mexico. "I started panicking," he told a military judge after giving himself up and being charged with desertion.

The Air Force said Hagarty was the first convicted deserter from an ICBM base since January 2013. In court, he admitted using LSD four times in 2015-16 and distributing it once, and he said he had deserted with the intention of never returning. He also admitted to using cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana multiple times. He was sentenced to 13 months in a military jail.

In all, disciplinary action was taken against 14 airmen. In addition, two accused airmen were acquitted at courts martial, and three other suspects were not charged.

from Local News https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/security-troops-on-us-nuclear-missile-base-in-wyoming-took-lsd

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clusterassets · 7 years ago

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New world news from Time: Xi Jinping

More Person of the Year

Person of the Year

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The Short List

Donald Trump

Xi Jinping

Robert Mueller

Kim Jong Un

Colin Kaepernick

Patty Jenkins

Behind the Photos

When Person of the Year is a Group

An Interview with Taylor Swift

Sometimes things just seem to go your way. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping strengthened his hold over the world’s most populous nation, was inducted into the pantheon of party leaders beside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping and—small detail—announced that China henceforth intends to lead the world. He mentioned this deep into an Oct. 18 speech that ran beyond three hours, which begins to account for why so audacious a declaration drew relatively little notice. But then it also came after the President of the United States had signaled time and again over the previous 10 months that America might be surrendering the top spot. Drama requires conflict. This felt more like process. Donald Trump posted an unexpected vacancy, and China readied its application for the slot.

But fortune, as Louis Pasteur noted, favors the prepared mind. China’s leaders spent decades priming the country—historically viewed by the outside world as so insular that its national icon is a wall—to stake a claim for how it has always seen itself: the Middle Kingdom, at the center of the world. And it was no coincidence that its new ambition was announced by a leader so firmly in control that the party congress authorizing what should be his final term declined to designate a successor.

Watch: Why the Silence Breakers Are the 2017 Person of the Year

This year, Xi cemented his place as the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng, the visionary who turned China toward a market economy in the mid-’80s. In Xi’s first five years in office, he has reasserted the primacy of the Communist Party, fought government corruption, launched a global strategy of economic outreach and stoked Chinese nationalism while casting himself as a world statesman. At home he has cultivated both a bourgeoisie and a cult of personality, and has brought an iron fist down on advocates of free speech, an uncensored Internet, civil society and human rights. In the process, he has dashed the hopes of the Western governments that believed China’s embrace of capitalism would lead to democracy.

All that was clear even before Trump took office and pushed Xi’s influence to new heights. Shedding the U.S. mission statement that had shaped the modern order—to spread democracy, free enterprise and universal rights—Trump instead enunciated a mercantilist worldview where self-interest is all. Then he went to Beijing and told Xi that China was better at it. China deserves “great credit,” he said in November, for being able to “take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens.”

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“Everything’s going to plan,” says Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at London’s King’s College and the author of CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping. “If you were to write a work of fiction on how to have a perfect presidency, you couldn’t do better: no opposition, a strong economy and an American President who seems to be a bigger fan of Xi Jinping than Xi Jinping is himself.”

The question now is whether his fortune holds.

Lintao Zhang—Getty ImagesXi addresses the Communist Party Congress on Oct. 18

At 64, Xi has lived more than 20 years longer than the age a Chinese male was expected to reach in 1953. Life expectancy in the year of his birth was 41; today it’s 76. But his life has already been memorialized by the party he heads.

Xi was born into privilege, the son of Xi Zhongxun, a commander turned propagandist who, because his wife often traveled for her job at the Marxism-Leninism Institute, was unusually prominent in their family life. The third of four children, Xi was a princeling who was educated at elite schools in Beijing and thus insulated from privations like the famine that killed millions of people in Mao’s ill-named Great Leap Forward. But his father was purged from leadership positions, and in Mao’s Cultural Revolution the younger Xi was “sent down” at age 15 to live for seven years in the village of Liangjiahe. It’s now a pilgrimage site.

In the peak summer months, 5,000 visitors arrive at Liangjiahe daily, legions of them officials, or cadres, of the party. They listen carefully to the guides and note observations for reports they will write when they get home. Newspapers line the walls of the cave where Xi lived, and the bookshelves include not only Chinese classics but also Voltaire, Hemingway and Kissinger. “Everyone used to go to the Mao base,” says taxi driver Biang Sheng Li, referring to another pilgrimage site an hour away, where the Long March ended. “But since last year, even more people are going to Xi’s village.”

The intended message has taken root. “Xi knew people’s life and their hardships,” says Zhu Rong Xian, 40, a Hangzhou businesswoman who made the pilgrimage. “It made him a better leader.” In a green military cap with a red star, signaling political fealty to the party, and tasseled leather boots, Zhu had donned the clothes of the China that emerged, as Xi did, from the ashes of communalism.

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The future President was an early supporter of Deng’s reform campaign, which embraced private business while maintaining a monopoly control of politics. Once rehabilitated, Xi’s father helped pioneer the special economic zones that tested the export-manufacturing economy that would drive China’s phenomenal growth for the next 40 years, fueled by cheap labor and U.S. investment. The son, after earning an engineering degree in Beijing and working briefly for the military, labored for a quarter-century in the provinces—the traditional proving ground for Chinese leaders. Terry Branstad, the current U.S. ambassador to China, remembers meeting him as governor of Iowa in 1985, when Xi was with a county-level delegation visiting the city of Muscatine. “What I found very different about him than other Chinese leaders I met with was that he’s much more outgoing and inquisitive,” Branstad tells TIME.

But Xi did not then stand out at home: when he ran for one of 150 openings on the Central Committee in 1997, he finished 151st (room was made). During most of his career, he has been overshadowed by his second wife, folk singer Peng Liyuan, whom he wed in 1987. By the time Xi did emerge in the senior echelon, the party was edging into crisis. Cadres had taken to capitalism a little too well, and the ruling legitimacy of the party was disappearing behind the tinted windows of the luxury Audis favored by even junior officials.

Xi emerged as the heir apparent in 2007 and oversaw the Beijing Olympics the following year—a lavish event that displayed unprecedented Chinese soft power to the watching world. His first act as General Secretary in 2012 was to set about cleaning up the party, ensuring that it made rules and not money. His anticorruption drive transformed public life. At the same time Xi was reopening 7,000 party offices, thousands of officials faced investigation—including many rivals. Golf courses shut down as Xi punished guanxi, the clubby networking dynamic that was once how business got done. Li Hua, a foreign-affairs official in China’s Xinjiang region, remembers feeling conspicuous for shunning marathon banquets in favor of jogging and reading history. “Before, that made me a loner and a source of suspicion,” he says. “But now—after the anticorruption campaign—it is quite normal.” Meanwhile, Xi made public visits to a humble Beijing dumpling shop, ordering steamed buns.

Corruption was not the only threat Xi perceived to party supremacy. Free expression, human rights, civil society and Internet freedom also became targets. After decades of carefully calibrating how much dissent to tolerate—an ambiguity that offered a measure of freedom for dissenters, and a stubborn hope for Western governments—China passed a series of comprehensive, harsh laws in the name of national security. “The main building blocks are now in place, so the idea of effecting change is more or less over,” says Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human-rights advocate. “For quite a long time, these developments have been cyclical in nature. But it is here to stay. It’s permanent, a new normal.”

Dahlin speaks from experience. In 2016, he was held for 23 days in what is blandly called a Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location, or a “black jail.” He was deprived of sleep but was not subjected to the torture that Chinese prisoners, beyond the reach of lawyers, endure. “For the first time,” he says now, at the midpoint in Xi’s tenure, “a major nation has legalized the systematic use of enforced disappearance.”

The founding myth of U.S. global leadership begins with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and a Japanese admiral fretting, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant.” Seven decades later, Trump revived the prewar slogan “America first,” suggesting that the giant was ready to lie down. Then he withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact intended to hold a rapacious China in check economically. When, in June, Trump announced the U.S.’s withdrawal from the international effort to slow climate change, the new President of France, Emmanuel Macron, privately declared in a summit: “Now China leads.”

And China was ready, finally. For decades, its leaders had heeded the advice of Deng: “Hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.” China had already shrugged off any lingering sense of inferiority in 2008, when it surveyed the wreckage of the global recession from a safe perch. But 2017 marked the coming out. Four days before Trump’s isolationist Inaugural Address, Xi made his first trip to the gathering of the globalist elite at Davos. “We should commit ourselves to growing an open global economy,” he said. “Pursuing protectionism is like locking oneself in a dark room. While wind and rain may be kept outside, that dark room will also block light and air.”

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At every turn in the months ahead, Xi told the world that China was no longer thinking only about itself. In March, it banned the trade in ivory. In May, Xi convened a summit on the Belt and Road Initiative, a $900 billion infrastructure project intended to bind Asia and Africa to China physically and economically, part of a larger effort to girdle the globe—from a highway in Pakistan to a port in Colombia—as the British Empire did a century ago. Like the British, what China has in mind is both profit and national glory. And it too has found an ally in the U.S.

“The U.S. was one of the countries that had done the most to help China modernize from the Maoist era, and there was an assumption that as China modernized and got wealthier, China would become more like the United States,” says Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. “That was never really realistically on the agenda, and now we know it’s not going to happen. But what is so extraordinary about Trump compared to other American Presidents is that no other person in the world—including Xi—has done more to make China great again.”

Having told his supporters on the campaign trail that the Chinese “rape our country,” Trump changed his tune in office, declaring that he feels “incredibly warm” about its President. His flattery adds to the glorification of “Big Uncle Xi,” as Chinese are urged to think of the leader who, after his campaigns to create “the Chinese dream” and “national rejuvenation,” reached for the ultimate prize on Oct. 18. “It is time for us to take center stage in the world,” Xi told the cadres.

There are reasons to doubt that that’s possible. China is certainly preparing itself for the future; with massive government support, it is positioned to surpass the U.S. in the next world-changing technology: artificial intelligence. It also excels in covert operations, including the major hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and by cultivating agents of influence at Western universities and in local politics. But its primary appeal to the world remains economic, with lending institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It faces the huge internal challenges of an aging population, an unworkable health care system, a halting transition to a service-based economy and a badly polluted environment. Trump may have abandoned the Paris Agreement, but U.S. carbon emissions are falling, while China’s continue to rise.

The military that Xi has given 30 years to become a global force is huge and newly assertive, but basically local: it opened its first overseas base, in Djibouti, only this year. State media refers to the disputed islets it expanded in the South China Sea—an aggressive assertion of regional hegemony—as “unsinkable aircraft carriers.” Of the floating kind, it has two.

Trump’s abandonment of core U.S. strengths—in his speech at the U.N. in September, he declined to take the side of democracy and universal freedoms—puts wind at the back of the nation’s totalitarian rival, whose rich but insular culture does not appear to travel well. “The bottom line,” says Brown, the Xi biographer, “is that China wants to have global reach, but it will be limited by its own nature.”

The West has not yet lost its luster. The U.S. gathers its power not just from its nearly 1,000 military bases but also from a magnetic, truly global popular culture, a premier higher-education system (which Xi’s daughter, a Harvard graduate, enjoyed) and an inclusive identity as a nation of immigrants. Since the collapse of communism as a global system, China no longer carries a unifying idea beyond its borders. Xi’s mantra is exporting “socialism with special Chinese characteristics.” No one seems to know what that means.

“I have asked many people: What exactly are you talking about?” says Elizabeth Economy, a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because as far as I can see, the Chinese model is a mixed market economy with significant state intervention, a repressive political system and corruption. Those to me are pretty much the three defining features of China over the past 40 years.”

Selling that in the world marketplace that Xi champions is the biggest challenge of all.

—With reporting by Zhang Chi/Liangjiahe

Lead photography by Krisztian Bocsi—Bloomberg/Getty Images

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December 06, 2017 at 04:13PM ClusterAssets Inc.,

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McCain and Kerry outline lessons from Vietnam after watching new Ken Burns documentary

A paratrooper from the 101st Airborne Division guides a medical evacuation helicopter through the jungle foliage to pick up casualties at Hue in April 1968. (Art Greenspon/AP)

BY JAMES HOHMANN with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve

THE BIG IDEA: Hundreds of Washington insiders gathered last night in the Kennedy Center Opera House for an advance screening of Ken Burns’s new documentary on Vietnam.

Before he showed half a dozen choice clips from his 10-part, 18-hour film, which premieres Sunday, the director asked everyone who served in the military during the war to stand so they could be recognized.

John McCain and John Kerry were among those who rose, along with other famous veterans like Bob Kerrey and Mike Mullen.

Burns then asked anyone who protested Vietnam to also stand. Dozens did.

“I couldn’t tell the difference,” the director said, referring to the two groups.

The veterans, including McCain, joined the audience in applauding the antiwar demonstrators.

That moment set a tone of reconciliation and harmony for a discussion about one of the darkest and most divisive chapters in American history.

John McCain leaves the Senate chamber after a vote last week. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

— Forty-two years after the fall of Saigon, McCain believes “it is the right time to take notes.” “There has to be a period of time after a conflict where the passion cools,” he said during a panel that followed the screening. “Maybe we can look back at the Vietnam conflict and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes that we did before.”

The 81-year-old, who is undergoing chemotherapy as he battles an aggressive form of brain cancer, said that watching “the magnificent work” reminded him of just how young so many of the Americans were who died. With sorrow in his voice, he talked about “the 18-, 19-, 20-year-old kids who had no idea what they were getting into.”

“Their leaders didn’t lead, whether they were military or civilian,” said the Arizona Republican, who spent 5½ years as a prisoner of war after getting shot down on a bombing mission over Hanoi in 1967. “By telling the American people one thing, which was not true, about the progress in the war and the body counts, it caused a wave of pessimism to go across this country, which bolstered the antiwar movement. We can learn lessons today because the world is in such turmoil: Tell the American people the truth!”

McCain said he visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as often as he can to take in the names of the more than 58,000 Americans who died. “Depends on the weather,” he said. “Sometimes once a week. Sometimes once every couple of weeks. I try to go very early in the morning or when it’s near sunset. … It’s really an incredibly emotional experience. … These young men died because of inadequate or corrupt leadership.”

As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, McCain is managing the defense reauthorization bill on the Senate floor this week. Whenever troops go into combat, he explained, it is essential that the country decides “what victory means” and, then, “do not forget it!”

“We need to be able to have leaders who will lead and who will be able to give (the troops) a path to victory so that we will not sacrifice them ever again in a lost cause,” McCain said.

John Kerry signs the Paris climate agreement last year while holding his granddaughter. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

— Kerry, who captained a swift boat in Vietnam before returning home to protest the war, echoed similar themes and alluded to the Trump administration’s credibility gap.

“Vietnam has always stood out to me a stunning failure of leadership,” said the former secretary of state. “We were operating without facts back then. In today’s world, it’s (also) really hard to figure out what the facts are. And people won’t honor facts. You know what they are, but you have your ‘alternative facts.’”

The 73-year-old spoke of feeling betrayed by “the best and the brightest” who he had looked up to in the American government. He singled out Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

“I thought I had felt all the anger I could feel about the war, but I hadn’t until I read ‘A Bright Shining Lie’ by Neil Sheehan,” Kerry said, referring to the classic book that came out in 1988. “All the way up the chain of command, people were just putting in gobbledygook information, and lives were being lost based on those lies and those distortions.”

Martha Raddatz of ABC News, who moderated the discussion, asked Kerry how society can learn “the right lessons” from Vietnam. “A lot of people don’t,” he replied. “It’s that simple.”

The five-term Massachusetts senator said that war should always be “a choice of last resort” after diplomatic options have been exhausted. He spoke of the need to have an endgame before going in. “So many missed opportunities,” Kerry said, shaking his head. “I hope never again will any generation have to face a moment like we did.”

Kerry explained that his combat experience as a young man has been “tricky” at times, and that he tried to not let it overly color his approach to the world during his tenure at Foggy Bottom. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t a captive of Vietnam,” he said. “Not everything is Vietnam!”

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in May. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

— By sparking new conversations, Burns hopes to heal old wounds. Famous for his in-depth explorations of the Civil War and World War II, the director highlighted additional parallels between Vietnam and the present moment: “Mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the administration … A president certain the news media is lying … Asymmetrical warfare that taxes the might of the United States military … A country divided in half … Huge document drops of stolen, classified material into the public sphere … Accusations that a political campaign reached out to a foreign power during a national election to affect the outcome.”

“So much of the division that we experience today, the hyper-partisanship that besets us, we think the seeds of that were sown in Vietnam,” Burns said.

— Kerry recounted his work with McCain in the 1990s to normalize relations with Vietnam, which grew out a conversation they had during an all-night flight on a CODEL to the Middle East. “We decided consciously to work on this because we felt very, very deeply that the country was still at war with itself, and that we needed to move forward in the relationship with Vietnam in order to be able to move forward with the relationship here at home,” Kerry said. “We wanted to be able to talk about Vietnam as a country, not as a war.”

As the 2004 Democratic nominee for president spoke, the 2008 Republican nominee interjected to say that Bill Clinton deserves credit for backing them up at a time (before he got reelected) when it was not politically easy.

— Former defense secretary Chuck Hagel, who enlisted to fight in Vietnam and received two Purple Hearts as an infantryman, praised the documentary for humanizing the war. “We too often don’t humanize the mechanics of war,” the former Nebraska Republican senator lamented. “We say, ‘Well, we’re going to send six or seven divisions or three battalions or squadrons of planes.’ But what does that mean to the men and women who are fighting and dying? … As secretary of defense, I saw that from many years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The same was true for Vietnam.”

— “The Vietnam War” premieres Sunday on PBS at 8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT.

— Special supplement: Washington Post Pop Culture Columnist Alyssa Rosenberg got exclusive access to the production process over the past year. She made a special companion podcast to accompany each of the 10 episodes in the miniseries. (Listen to her preview here.)

Listen to James’s quick summary of today’s Big Idea and the headlines you need to know to start your day:

Subscribe to The Daily 202’s Big Idea on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Podcasts and other podcast players.

A MESSAGE FROM THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

Stop the looming health insurance tax Congress is running out of time to protect families, seniors, and small businesses

Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost’s morning briefing for decision-makers. Sign up to receive the newsletter.

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:

The many trials and tweets of Trump’s travel ban

— One round for the Trump administration on its travel ban — the Supreme Court agreed to block a lower-court ruling allowing 24,000 sponsored refugees into the country. From Robert Barnes and Matt Zapotosky: “The court issued a one-paragraph statement granting the administration’s request for a stay of the latest legal maneuvering … There were no recorded dissents to the decision … At issue is whether the president can block a group of about 24,000 refugees, who have assurances from sponsors, from entering the United States. ”

The ruling follows a June decision that no person with a “bona fide” connection to the United States could be denied entry, which the administration determined did not include extended family members or refugees with assurances. “The Justice Department this week asked the Supreme Court to step in again — although only to block refugees, not grandparents and other relatives beyond the nuclear family. Even those refugees with formal assurances from a resettlement agency lack the sort of connection that should exempt them from the ban, the Justice Department argued in its new filing to the Supreme Court.”

— The administration is also weighing slashing the number of refugee admissions to below 50,000, which would be the fewest since at least 1980. The New York Times’s Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Miriam Jordan report: “In recent weeks, as the deadline approached for Mr. Trump to issue the annual determination for refugee admissions required by the Refugee Act of 1980, some inside the White House — led by Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser for policy — have pressed to set the ceiling even lower.” But other administration members — including officials in the National Security Council, the State Department and the Pentagon — are opposed to the idea, which has not been finalized.

— The Supreme Court also ruled that Texas did not immediately have to redraw electoral maps found to diminish the impact of minority voters. Robert Barnes reports: “The 5-to-4 ruling almost surely means the 2018 midterm elections will be conducted in the disputed congressional and legislative districts. The justices gave no reasons in their one-paragraph statement granting a request from Texas that it not be forced to draw new districts until the Supreme Court reviewed the lower court’s decision. But the court’s liberals — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — signaled their unhappiness by noting they would not have agreed to Texas’s request. The court’s intervention was a victory for Texas Republicans, who had drawn the districts. It disappointed civil rights groups, who had noted that even though growth in the state’s Hispanic population was the reason for additional congressional seats, none were drawn to favor minority candidates.”

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

— Exclusive: Internal Democratic poll shows Jeff Flake is in real trouble. Senate Majority PAC, the lead outside group focused on the upper chamber, commissioned an internal poll last week that shows Arizona’s Republican senator in danger of losing both the primary and the general election. He’s lost support from Trump supporters by challenging the president, but he’s not getting credit from independents for standing up to the White House. The survey, conducted by GBA Strategies, found that primary challenger Kelli Ward currently leads Flake by 27 points, 58 percent to 31 percent, in a head-to-head match-up among Republicans. Among GOP primary voters, the first-term Flake’s favorable rating is 25 percent – with 56 percent viewing him unfavorably. His job approval rating with his own party is 34 percent in the survey, while his overall approval rating is 38 percent (with 50 percent disapproval.)

Against Kyrsten Sinema, the likely Democratic candidate, Flake currently trails by 7 points – 47 percent to 40 percent.

The survey also shows that Senate Majority Leader McConnell is viewed favorably by just 17 percent of Republican primary voters in Arizona, while 42 percent see him unfavorably.

The live-caller survey of 600 likely 2018 general election voters and 500 likely Republican primary voters was in the field from Aug. 30 to Sept. 7. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent for the general and 4.4 percent for the primary. “Arizona is clearly an opportunity for Senate Democrats to pick up a seat,” said JB Poersch, president of Senate Majority PAC. “The political climate in Arizona hints growing problems for the GOP Congressional brand.”

To be sure, it’s early. Breitbart played up a poll at this point two years ago that showed John McCain losing to Ward by 9 points, and he wound up winning comfortably. The filing deadline is not until May 30, and the primary is not until Aug. 30. Someone else could still jump into the primary. Establishment Republicans believe Ward would get crushed in a general, even in a reddish state like Arizona, and Flake is more competitive. They say this is why Democrats are sharing a poll like this.

GET SMART FAST:

America’s middle class had its highest-earning year ever in 2016, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report. Officials said the median household income in America was $59,039 last year, surpassing the previous record of $58,655 set in 1999. (Heather Long)

Apple unveiled three new editions of the iPhone, including a premium version costing $999. The premium iPhone X will have enhanced cameras for facial recognition, allowing users to unlock the phone just by looking at it. (Hayley Tsukayama)

Edith Windsor, whose Supreme Court case paved the way for legalizing same-sex marriage, died at 88. Barack Obama called her one of the “quiet heroes” who had advanced equality. (AP)

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray announced his resignation following a fifth claim of child sex abuse — this one from his cousin, who said the alleged abuse happened decades ago in New York. Murray has repeatedly denied the accusations, which began in April, and claimed they are part of a political takedown. (The Seattle Times)

Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R) and his wife are recovering from nonlife threatening injuries after their car was rear-ended and “flipped multiple times” on their way back to Washington. Both were released from the hospital Tuesday, a representative said. (WSB Radio)

More than 370,000 refugees from Burma’s long-persecuted Rohingya ethnic group have fled their country for neighboring Bangladesh, international migration groups said Tuesday. The Rohingya are desperately seeking to escape a crisis the United Nations human rights chief called a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing. (Annie Gowen)

Five years after the Benghazi attacks, a federal court in Washington has begun searching for potential jurors in the terrorism trial. The 28-page questionnaire extends far beyond routine vetting inquiries for would-be jurors, asking them about views on whether the U.S. government acts fairly toward mostly Muslim countries and aggressively enough to fight terrorism. (Spencer S. Hsu)

The founder of a company that uses artificial intelligence to help people fight parking tickets online has created a free chatbot to help people sue Equifax, a credit-rating agency that was hacked and exposed the information of more than 143 million U.S. consumers. With the help of the bot, customers can sue Equifax for thousands of dollars in just minutes. (Peter Holley)

The World Anti-Doping Agency has agreed to clear 95 Russian athletes who were implicated in the country’s longtime doping program — a decision that is likely to fuel debate over Russian athletes’ eligibility in sporting events. (New York Times)

In Beijing, people are getting married for license plates. The spike in sham marriages comes as authorities began issuing new plates via a six-time-a-year lottery system to reduce congestion in the crowded capital city. The new system is daunting, but allows loopholes for spouses — and many single, would-be drivers are cashing in. (The Atlantic)

Authorities in suburban Chicago are investigating the death of a 19-year-old woman, who was found this weekend in a hotel’s industrial walk-in freezer. Her mother has since lashed out at the hotel and local police department, saying they “helped kill her child” by failing to act fast enough after learning of her disappearance. (Andrew deGrandpre)

A contentious lawsuit over the rights to a “selfie” taken by a monkey was settled on Tuesday, capping a years-long legal battle that ensued after a primate grabbed a wildlife photographer’s camera — and quickly snapped a shot of his own smiling face. (Amy B Wang)

AFTER THE STORMS:

— Trump will visit Florida Thursday in Irma’s wake. David Nakamura reports: “[For an] administration whose first eight months has been marked by internecine squabbles and a lack of legislative accomplishments, the initial competence in managing the storms represented a relief — and a rare chance to take credit … Several major policy questions have been raised in the wake of the storms, including whether Trump will reconsider his proposals to slash FEMA’s grant programs and his administration’s hostility to [environmental] regulations … But overall, emergency management veterans said, Trump and his team deserve acknowledgment for getting through the first phase of the crisis in a way that inspired public confidence.” “[Trump], for all the negatives we’ve heard about him,has done the right thing,” said Clinton-era FEMA official Mark Merritt. “He picked a great team and let them do their job.”

— Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D) criticized officials who deny the connection between extreme weather and climate change. Politico’s Michael Grunwald reports: “Nelson said it’s clear that manmade global warming made Irma worse by increasing the temperature and the height of the seas that fueled the storm. He said he didn’t want to play partisan politics in the aftermath of a hurricane, but then went on to criticize Republicans in general and [Florida Gov. Rick] Scott in particular—though not by name—for opposing climate action. He noted that both the Trump administration in Washington and the Scott administration in Tallahassee have reportedly discouraged government employees from even talking about climate change.”

After losing electricity to Irma, assisted living facility worries for patients’ lives

— But millions of Floridians remain without power, and officials worry the lights may not come back on for weeks. Patricia Sullivan, Mark Berman and Katie Zezima report: “Across the nation’s third most-populous state, that discomfort played out in homes that were silent without the usual thrum of perpetual air-conditioning. It meant refrigerators were unable to cool milk, laundry machines were unable to clean clothes and, for the particularly young and old, potential danger in a state where the temperatures can range from warm to stifling. Even for those who had power, some also were struggling to maintain cellphone service or Internet access, sending Floridians into tree-riddled streets in an effort to spot a few precious bars of signal to contact loved ones. …

“At its peak, the Department of Homeland Security said about 15 million Floridians — an astonishing three out of four state residents — lacked power … Duke Energy Florida said it would restore power to most customers by Sunday, a week after Irma made its first landfall in Florida. Some harder-hit areas could take longer due to the rebuilding effort.”

— And it’s not just Florida: almost 900,000 residents of Georgia were still without power yesterday. Over 300,000 of them were just in the Atlanta-metro area. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

— For some, the lack of power is about much more than discomfort. Patricia Sullivan has a story on an assisted living facility that went without electricity for three days: “Cape Coral Shores, on a peninsula west of Fort Myers on the Florida Gulf Coast, had 20 patients stay during the storm … Power went out at the facility … and was not restored for days even as homes and businesses all around it saw their lights come back on … A handful of small fans powered by a borrowed generator were all that kept the situation from devolving into a medical emergency[.]”

A father and son paddle though their flooded neighborhood in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma in Fort Myers, Fla. (AP/David Goldman)

— Jacksonville reckoned with historic flooding. Lori Rozsa reports: “Driven by tidal flow, an already saturated inland waterway system and Irma’s powerful winds and rains, the swollen and fast-rushing St. Johns River crashed over sea walls and sandbags and left much of the area underwater. Officials called the flooding ‘epic’ and ‘historic,’ with the river through this city of nearly 900,000 hitting levels not seen since 1846 — a year after Florida became a state. On Tuesday the city started to recover, but meteorologists warned that some flooding is likely to return as storm-generated waters rush south from the Carolinas toward the Atlantic Ocean.”

— St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands has been essentially razed by Irma. Anthony Faiola reports: “[T]his 20-square-mile island is now perhaps the site of Irma’s worst devastation on American soil. Six days after the storm … the island finally has an active-theater disaster zone. Military helicopters buzz overhead and a Navy aircraft carrier is anchored off the coast, as the National Guard patrols the streets. The Coast Guard is ferrying the last of St. John’s dazed tourists to large cruise ships … More than a few locals, cut off from the world with no power, no landlines and no cellular … are leaving, too, some of them in tears. …

“A drive up formerly picturesque mountain roads reveals a landscape of such astonishing devastation that it looks as if it were bombed.Entire houses have disappeared. Others are tilting on their sides. Horizons of waxy-green bay leaf trees on jade-colored hills have turned to barren wastelands, as if the world’s largest weed whacker had hedged the entire island. … And that’s just damage from the weather. In the days following the storm, lawlessness broke out — here and on other Caribbean islands. Thieves hit a string of businesses. Houses were burgled, entire ATM machines stolen.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders pauses during a rally in support of the Affordable Care Act in Covington, Ky. (John Minchillo/AP)

SINGLE-PAYER ON STAGE LEFT:

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is expected to introduce his single-payer health-care legislation today with the backing of a record 15 Democratic senators. David Weigel reports: “Sanders’s bill, the Medicare for All Act of 2017, has no chance of passage in a Republican-run Congress. But after months of behind-the-scenes meetings and a public pressure campaign, the bill is already backed by most of the senators seen as likely 2020 Democratic candidates — if not by most senators facing tough reelection battles in 2018. The bill would revolutionize America’s health-care system, replacing it with a public system that would be paid for by higher taxes. … As he described his legislation, Sanders focused on its simplicity, suggesting that Americans would be happy to pay higher taxes if it meant the end of wrangling with health-care companies. The size of the tax increase, he said, would be determined in a separate bill.”

“Republicans, bruised and exhausted by a failed campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act, were giddy about the chance to attack Democrats and Sanders … Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a medical doctor, crowed that Sanders’s bill had become ‘the litmus test for the liberal left’ and that Americans would reject any costly plan for universal insurance coverage.”

— Sanders makes the case in a Times op-ed this morning: “Needless to say, there will be huge opposition to this legislation from the powerful special interests that profit from the current wasteful system. The insurance companies, the drug companies and Wall Street will undoubtedly devote a lot of money to lobbying, campaign contributions and television ads to defeat this proposal. But they are on the wrong side of history.”

— Nancy Pelosi tries to keep the tent big. Kelsey Snell and David Weigel report: “Pelosi (D-Calif.) declined to endorse ‘Medicare for All’ legislation backed by [Sanders] and instead called on Democrats to release a wide range of proposals to fix and improve [Obamacare]. … ‘I don’t think it’s a litmus test,’ Pelosi said in an interview. ‘What we want is to have as many people as possible, everybody, covered, and I think that’s something that we all embrace.’ Pelosi said that she would like a variety of health-care ideas to be vetted and analyzed by budget scorekeepers but that she thinks none of them will succeed while the ACA is under attack from Republicans. ‘Right now I’m protecting the Affordable Care Act,’ Pelosi said. ‘None of these things, whether it’s Bernie’s or others, can really prevail unless we protect the Affordable Care Act.’”

— Why this is still pie-in-the-sky, explains the New York Times’s Margot Sanger-Katz: “[L]ast week, a detailed analysis of the Sanders health care plan from researchers at the Urban Institute showed that it would probably cost the government double what the campaign proposed. It is the second credible analysis to suggest that the Sanders plan costs more than advertised. … The Sanders plan is light on some key details, but even in sketch form, it seems clear that it would require even bigger tax increases than the sizable ones the campaign has called for. If you look around the world, lots of countries have single-payer systems. … So how could a single-payer system here still be so expensive? … Here’s why: Medicare pays doctors and hospitals higher prices than single-payer systems do in other countries.”

— Meanwhile, Republicans are still debating whether they should try to gut the ACA. Politico’s Burgess Everett and Jennifer Haberkorn report: “Republicans are paralyzed over what to do about health care, caught between a bipartisan effort to shore up Obamacare and the opportunity to take one last swing at their years-long promise to repeal the law. Leaders of both efforts have less than three weeks to gather enough support[.] … A group of senators is making a last gasp effort to repeal some of the law and replace it with a block grant program to the states, though many Senate Republicans are pessimistic they will be able to get the 50 of their 52 senators needed to support it in the coming days.” Time is running out — the budget resolution containing the instructions that allows Republicans to push through health-care legislation without Democratic support expires on Sept. 30.

Why tax reform is hard

REPUBLICANS PIN THEIR HOPES ON A TAX REWRITE:

— But some conservatives are skeptical of Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn’s ability to advance tax reform with Republicans. Politico’s Nancy Cook and Rachael Bade report: “Neither man has ever worked in or with the legislative branch. They lack inside knowledge about how to navigate Congress at an especially fractious time. Cohn remains a registered Democrat; Mnuchin is a Republican, but he also has a long history of donating to the other party. … Republicans throughout Washington are concerned that if the White House can’t craft a plan that unifies the GOP, Trump’s tax writers will once again circumvent Hill Republicans in order to score a win. … The idea of the White House totally undercutting GOP leaders’ tax strategy and striking a deal with Democrats is not altogether inconceivable, especially after last week’s debt deal.”

–They might have reason to worry: Trump is meeting today with bipartisan members of the Problem Solvers’ Caucus. And he had dinner last night at the White House with several key Democratic senators in red states won by Trump in 2016 — and Finance Committee Chair Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). At the meeting were Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.). “Manchin, Heitkamp and Donnelly are the only Democratic senators who did not sign a letter addressed to Republican leaders and Trump that said the Democratic caucus would not support a tax overhaul that cuts taxes for the ‘top 1 percent’ or adds to the government’s $20 trillion debt,” the AP reported.

— But Democrats still have a long list of non-starters on taxes. The New York Times’s Alan Rappeport and Thomas Kaplan report: “Senate Democrats on Tuesday warned they would work to block any rewrite of the tax code that repealed the estate tax and the deduction for state and local taxes[.] … Congressional Republicans and the White House agree that the tax on inheritances should be scrapped … The red lines from Democrats are becoming increasingly stark. [Chuck] Schumer also said that a repeal of the deduction for state and local taxes and any changes to the mortgage interest deduction would also be non-starters with Democrats.”

— How will taxes happen? House Budget Chair Diane Black is pushing Paul Ryan to bring a budget to the floor this month, even as the House Freedom Caucus continues to insist on seeing a comprehensive tax plan before agreeing to a budget. Politico’s Sarah Ferris reports: “Black, frustrated by her party’s divisions, is daring die-hard conservatives to vote no, forcing them to take the fall for choking off the party’s chances at tax reform. ‘Sometimes when you get this close, perhaps you just need to put it on the floor,’ Black (R-Tenn.) [said].”

— Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are preparing to move on one of Ivanka Trump’s signature issues: affordable childcare. Politico’s Burgess Everett: “Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) will lead the introduction of the “Child Care for Working Families Act” on Thursday, an aide familiar with the effort said. The move is intended to showcase broad Democratic buy-in on the bill compared to President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ halting progress on the issue. The bill, which has been under development for months, will focus on early learning, child care costs and people who administer child care. “

DEALING WITH DACA:

— White House legislative director Marc Short signaled the White House may back off its calls to include funding for Trump’s border wall in legislation to protect to DACA recipients. Kelsey Snell, Ashley Parker and Ed O’Keefe report: “[Short] told a breakfast gathering … that Trump ‘believes that a physical barrier is important’ between the United States and Mexico. But he said that the administration does not ‘want to bind ourselves into a construct that makes reaching a conclusion on DACA impossible.’ … But the issue of border wall funding is still likely to be a point of contention in spending negotiations later this year. Congress voted last week to extend current spending levels through Dec. 8, leaving lawmakers three months to work out a long-term spending agreement. Short hinted Tuesday that Trump may demand border funding as a part of those negotiations.”

— House leaders from both parties are planning to huddle today to discuss possibly taking up DACA legislation. Ed O’Keefe reports: “The meeting … is a signal that congressional leaders are indeed trying to build support for a broader plan that would pair some kind of legislation to deal with dreamers … with a plan to expandsecurity along the U.S.-Mexico border. … Pelosi and her lieutenants had requested a meeting with [Paul] Ryan shortly after Trump decided to end the DACA program in March of next year unless Congress can resolve the issue. She told reporters Tuesday that House Democrats are quickly coalescing around legislation that would grant legal protections to DACA recipients and set them on a years-long course to apply for U.S. citizenship.”

McConnell: ‘My assumption is the debt ceiling will continue’

— Mitch McConnell expressed hesitation yesterday about ending the debt ceiling, as Trump had discussed with Chuck Schumer. Sean Sullivan reports: “‘Getting Congress to give up the tool like that would probably be quite a challenge,’ [McConnell] said. [He] predicted that the debt ceiling ‘will continue and we’ll have to decide when these intervals come along the best way to handle it.’ … McConnell said Tuesday that he does not expect to have to raise the debt ceiling again until ‘some time next year.’”

A photographer captures a mural of car attack victim Heather Heyer. (Steve Helber/AP)

— Congress has sent a resolution to Trump condemning the Charlottesville violence and encouraging him to speak out against hate groups. Mike DeBonis and Jenna Portnoy report: “The legislation, which passed by unanimous consent in the Senate on Monday and in the House on Tuesday, will be presented to Trump for his signature in an effort by lawmakers to secure a more forceful denunciation of racist extremism from the president. … The text of the resolution was negotiated on a bipartisan basis by the members of Virginia’s congressional delegation, overcoming early differences between Republicans and Democrats about how to characterize the events in Charlottesville and whether to explicitly criticize Trump’s response. … The authors of the legislation purposely introduced it as a joint resolution, which is sent for a president’s signature, rather than as a simple or concurrent resolution, which are not.” The text notably categorizes the killing of Heather Heyer as a “domestic terrorist attack.”

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. speaks to reporters following a briefing on Syria on Capitol Hill. (Susan Walsh/AP)

— Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) joined Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)’s campaign to force a debate on Congress approving a new Authorization for Use of Military Force. Karoun Demirjian reports: “But Kaine’s decision to join Paul’s efforts did not inspire other senators to follow suit, as leading Republicans and Democrats argued against putting an expiration date on existing authorizations for the United States’ engagement in high-stakes conflicts around the world. … It’s a change of heart for Kaine, who was quick to criticize last week when Paul launched his effort to add to the defense bill a six-month deadline to pass an authorization for military force.” The Senate will vote today on the measure to force an AUMF debate, Karoun reports. It’s expected to fail.

Three times politicians made mistakes on Twitter

— Sen. Ted Cruz blamed his Twitter account’s “liking” an illicit adult video on a “staffing issue.” Ed O’Keefe and Avi Selk report: “By late morning, reporters were waiting outside the U.S. Capitol to question the flesh-and-blood Cruz about his online alias’s handiwork, which he disavowed. ‘It was a staffing issue and it was inadvertent,’ the senator said. ‘It was a mistake.’ He said ‘a number of people’ in his office had access to his account[.] … ‘This was not how I envisioned waking up this morning,’ Cruz told his journalist interrogators at the Capitol, and then got in a crack of his own: ‘If I had known that this would trend so quickly, then perhaps we should have posted something like this during the Indiana primary.’”

Putin on a hunting and fishing trip in southern Siberia. (Alexei Nikolsky/Kremlin via Reuters)

THERE’S A BEAR IN THE WOODS:

— Another Flynn omission? Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn may have failed to disclose a trip to the Middle East to negotiate a business deal with the Saudi government and a Russian government agency, CNN’s Manu Raju and Marshall Cohen write this morning. House ” Democrats allege the retired Army lieutenant general broke the law by omitting the trip, according to the letter they sent to Flynn’s former business partners requesting more information about his overseas travels and contacts.”

— Flynn is refusing a new request to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee. CNN’s Jim Sciutto reports: “Flynn first declined to comply with a Senate subpoena in May, asserting his Fifth Amendment rights. More recently, the committee has reiterated its request and Flynn has declined again, the source said. Flynn has also been subpoenaed by the House intelligence committee, which is conducting a separate probe into Russia’s election meddling. Flynn had offered to testify before both the Senate and House intelligence committees in exchange for immunity, but neither committee accepted the offer.”

— Putin sought a “broad reset” of U.S.-Russian relations in the third month of Trump’s presidency — dispatching a Moscow diplomat to the State Department to propose “full normalization” across “all major branches of government.” Buzzfeed News’s John Hudson reports: “The proposal … called for the wholesale restoration of diplomatic, military and intelligence channels severed between the two countries after Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine and Syria. The broad scope of the Kremlin’s reset plan came with an ambitious launch date: immediately. … [And it] reveals one of Moscow’s unspoken assumptions – that Trump wouldn’t share the lingering US anger over Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 election and might accept a lightning fast rapprochement.” In meetings with Russian officials, members of the administration, including Rex Tillerson, signaled that such an arrangement would not be feasible.

Putin’s proposed timeline: “By April, a top Russian cyber official, Andrey Krutskikh, would meet with his American counterpart for consultations on ‘information security,’ the document proposed. By May, the two countries would hold ‘special consultations’ on the war in Afghanistan, the Iran nuclear deal, the ‘situation in Ukraine,’ and efforts to denuclearize the ‘Korean Peninsula.’ And by the time Putin and Trump held their first meeting, the heads of the CIA, FBI, National Security Council and Pentagon would meet face-to-face with their Russian counterparts to discuss areas of mutual interest. A raft of other military and diplomatic channels opened during the Obama administration’s first-term ‘reset’ would also be restored.”

— The Trump campaign has begun turning over documents to Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. The Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff reports: “John Dowd, an attorney representing the president, said that the campaign is in ‘total cooperation’ with Mueller on the matter. … The Trump campaign has previously turned over documents to congressional investigators looking into the possibility of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. That those documents have now been given to Mueller is a sign that the two investigations are covering similar ground, albeit from unique investigative vantage points[.]”

Watch President Trump’s full introductory remarks with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak of Malaysia

THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE:

— The Malaysian prime minister visited the White House yesterday despite concerns from human rights groups. The Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey reports: “Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak is linked to a multibillion-dollar embezzlement scandal, and human rights groups say he has limited free speech, imprisoned opposition leaders, and locked up Malaysians who have ‘insulted’ the government. But on Tuesday, Najib was greeted at the White House by President Trump, who listened to his guest’s pledge to invest billions of dollars for US infrastructure while publicly ignoring his links to the scandal that the Justice Department is actively probing. … It’s the latest example of Trump’s compliments directed at dictators[.] … Presidents often meet leaders who’ve done unsavory deeds — Obama played golf with Najib in December 2014 — but what’s different now is the absence of a public slap on the wrist.”

A key statistic: “Of the 32 foreign leaders from sovereign countries that Trump has invited to the White House so far, 15 rule over nations that either score in the bottom half of the Global Democracy Ranking, which uses metrics to measure the health of 112 democracies in the world, or hail from countries like Saudi Arabia that have no pretense of democratic rule.”

— Trump’s voter fraud commission came under fire as it met yesterday in New Hampshire, where the commission’s vice chairman claimed voter fraud occurred in November. John Wagner reports: “Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) largely defended an article published Friday in which he pointed to statistics showing that more than 6,000 people had voted in a close election here using out-of-state driver’s licenses to prove their identity. He suggested that was evidence of people taking advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration and heading to the Granite State to cast fraudulent votes. … Kobach’s article has been rebuked by election experts and among those who criticized his argument was New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner (D), a fellow commission member[.] … Gardner defended the Senate election result as ‘real and valid’ and said Kobach’s article … showed why the commission needs to be more careful about its assertions moving forward.”

— The Campaign Legal Center announced the Heritage Foundation pushed back on naming Democrats or mainstream Republicans to the voter fraud commission: “The [Heritage] employee wrote personally to Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushing back on even a single Democrat being named to the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity and discouraging the White House from naming mainstream Republican officials and/or academics to the commission. The Heritage Foundation employee, whose name has been redacted by the Department of Justice, complained that the White House did not consult with their ‘experts’ who ‘have written more on the voter fraud issue than anyone in the country on our side of the political aisle.’ A few months later, President Donald Trump appointed Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation to the Pence-Kobach Commission. Mr. von Spakovsky is widely considered the architect of the voter fraud myth.”

Meet Hope Hicks: White House communications director

— Trump’s longtime adviser Hope Hicks was named White House communications director yesterday. Hicks was already serving in the role on an interim basis, but she now shifts to it permanently. (Anne Gearan)

— Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said yesterday the Justice Department should consider prosecuting former FBI Director Jim Comey for actions that “were improper and likely could have been illegal.” Anne Gearan reports: “‘I think if there’s ever a moment where we feel someone’s broken the law, particularly if they’re the head of the FBI, I think that’s something that certainly should be looked at,’ Sanders said. She said that recommending such a prosecution is ‘not the president’s role,’ and that the White House is not encouraging it. ‘That’s the job of the Department of Justice, and something they should certainly look at,’ Sanders said. Asked to clarify, Sanders said this: ‘Anybody that breaks the law, whatever that process is that needs to be followed, should certainly be looked at,’ Sanders said. ‘If they determine that that’s the course of action to take, then they should certainly do that, but I’m not here to ever direct DOJ in — in the actions that they should take.’”

Malaysian prime minister’s visit to Trump International Hotel could be violation of Constitution’s emoluments clause

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST:

— The White House sought to downplay questions about Malaysian Prime Minister Razak’s visit to Trump’s D.C. hotel on Tuesday, with Huckabee Sanders telling reporters the administration “certainly [didn’t] book their hotel accommodations.” “[But] the prime minister’s official White House visit also brought at least 24 hours of activity and sales to the [hotel],” Jonathan O’Connell reports. “And it is likely to escalate debate over whether the president is benefiting from a luxury property that has become Washington’s new power center — and, its critics say, a staging area for those seeking White House access. …[Signs] of the Malaysia delegation’s presence were obvious at the property[:] At lunchtime Monday, more than a dozen members of Najib’s entourage relaxed in a lounge area reserved for hotel guests. On Tuesday morning, dozens of delegation members convened in meeting rooms [while] some attended a white-tablecloth breakfast … Events of this scale would probably mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for the Trump Organization …”

— Trump’s resort in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., is seeking permission from the government to hire more foreign guest workers as housekeepers. Buzzfeed News’s Jessica Garrison, Jeremy Singer-Vine and Ken Bensinger report: “The resort, which is near Miami, licenses [Trump’s] name but is owned by the International Resorts Management Group. It asked for permission to bring in 10 housekeepers, claiming no Americans wanted the jobs. Including this latest request, companies owned by Trump or bearing his name have already sought to hire at least 380 foreign guest workers under the federal H-2 visa guest worker programs since [he launched his] presidential campaign.”

Kim Jong Un at an undisclosed location in North Korea. (Korean Central News Agency/AP)

THE NEW WORLD ORDER:

— North Korea lashed out at the new “vicious” sanctions package approved by the U.N. Security Council this week, reiterating its warnings through a spokesman that the United States would “suffer the greatest pain” for leading the sanctions effort. (Michelle Ye Hee Lee)

— One day earlier, the State Department’s top official on North Korea quietly visited Moscow to urge support for the new sanctions, Josh Rogin reports. But the two countries issued two very different statement about the meeting:

“This visit is an example of our ongoing discussions with the international community to increase pressure on [North Korea],” a State Department spokesman said Monday. “The United States seeks stability and the peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

But a statement from the Russian foreign ministry Tuesday had a very different take: “The Russian side stressed that there is no other way to settle the problems of the Korean Peninsula … other than by political and diplomatic means,” the ministry said. “The sides noted readiness for joint efforts … including in the context of the implementation of the Russian-Chinese roadmap for the Korean settlement.” (Both Washington and Seoul have publicly and repeatedly rejected the “freeze for freeze” option advocated by Moscow and Beijing.)

— The State Department has reported additional American diplomats harmed in Cuba. Anne Gearan reports: “There are now 21 reported cases, up from 19 on Sept. 1, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said. A U.S. investigation is ongoing, Nauert said. The Trump administration has not blamed the Cuban government for what the union representing Foreign Service officers called ‘sonic harassment attacks’ dating to late 2016. Cuba has denied wrongdoing in the mysterious events. Victims have been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries, hearing loss and other neurological and physical ailments, the union said.”

SOCIAL MEDIA SPEED READ:

Trump’s voter fraud panel met in a public setting for the first time. From conservative firebrand Ann Coulter:

Bernie Sanders’s former press secretary offered the opposite take:

Hillary Clinton gave dual credit for this famous line in her new book:

The former chief of staff to Al Gore and Joe Biden gave the book a positive review:

But Trump’s former press secretary wrote it off:

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum replied to Spicer’s criticism:

From the Washington Examiner’s White House correspondent:

The editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight responded to the list:

The president sent out this tweet the same day that Clinton’s book dropped:

From Trump’s former Office of Government Ethics director:

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss marked the 55th anniversary of this moment:

Two of Trump’s chroniclers are writing a book:

The top Senate Democrat may need to upgrade to the new iPhone:

CNN’s Jake Tapper mocked Ted Cruz’s Twitter investigation:

A nun in South Florida took the Irma clean-up effort into her own hands:

And Eric Trump welcomed his first child, the president’s ninth grandchild:

Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich departing his Chicago home for Littleton, Colo., to begin his 14-year prison sentence. (AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)

GOOD READS FROM ELSEWHERE:

— Chicago Magazine, “Blago: His Life in Prison,” by David Bernstein: “Five years ago, Rod Blagojevich kissed his wife and daughters goodbye, waved one last time to reporters, and flew to Colorado to start a 14-year sentence. ‘I’ll see you guys when I see ya,’ he called out … For Blagojevich, a man who rose to political heights from modest [roots], prison has been a humbling experience, full of little indignities. As at most correctional facilities, inmates are assigned menial jobs, such as washing dishes, mopping floors, and scrubbing toilets. At the low-security facility, Blagojevich did a three-month stint in the kitchen, one of the toughest tasks, but primarily worked in the law library and taught classes on the Civil War and World War II. His current job as an orderly at the camp pays $8.40 a month. ‘My jurisdiction was once all of the State of Illinois. Now I’ve got two hallways to clean,’ he says.”

— Buzzfeed News, “There’s Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley,” by Ben Smith: “The blinding rise of [Trump] over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics. Tech is manifestly unready for this new era. They’ve been playing small-ball politics of regulation, and coasting on incredibly high approval ratings. But there are signs they feel the winds changing … And the political class can smell blood.”

— The Daily Beast, “How Omarosa Became the Most ‘Despised’ Person in the Trump White House,” by Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng: “According to four sources in and outside the West Wing, the longtime Trump confidant is isolated inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as she quietly plots against her fellow senior officials. Colleagues regularly complain about Manigault’s behavior and work ethic. She frequently derails internal meetings with irrelevant or counterproductive interjections and she’s earned a reputation for attempting to micromanage [communications] operations. [John Kelly] has tried to curtail Manigault’s direct access … But her continued proximity to Trump—he speaks with her over the phone, even in the middle of the night—underscores just how thorny her tenure has been for those tasked with managing the administration.” “She doesn’t have any friends in high places—except the one place [where] it matters,” said one Republican official.

HOT ON THE LEFT

“Luis Gutiérrez doubles down, calls John Kelly ‘mean’ for supporting DACA’s demise,” from Ed O’Keefe: “Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) doubled down on his criticisms of White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly on Tuesday, saying that President Trump’s top aide is ‘mean’ for standing by while the administration prepares to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants known as ‘dreamers.’ … Asked whether it was inappropriate to attack Kelly, a key GOP broker on the immigration debate and a former Marine general, Gutiérrez insisted he saw no issue. ‘He’s a politician, okay, not a general. I don’t see a uniform. He’s a politician who works for Donald Trump,’ Gutiérrez [said].”

HOT ON THE RIGHT:

“Christopher Columbus statue defaced in Central Park,” from the New York Post: “A vandal defiled a larger-than-life statue of Christopher Columbus in Central Park on Tuesday, leaving ‘blood’-red paint on the explorer’s hands and scrawling ‘Hate will not be tolerated’ on its pedestal. The vandal also left an apparent threat at the base of the 7-foot-tall bronze: ‘’#somethingscoming.’ Monuments dedicated to Columbus have become a hot-button issue in the Big Apple amid a national debate on statues honoring controversial figures. Mayor Bill de Blasio recently assembled a commission to review and recommend the removal of any ‘oppressive’ monuments … [and] City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito urged that the 76-foot structure honoring Columbus at Columbus Circle be reviewed for potential removal.”

DAYBOOK:

Trump has a meeting with his Domestic Policy Council, which Pence will join, and another with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). The president will then sit down with the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked whether Trump would read Hillary Clinton’s new book: “Whether or not he’s going to read Hillary Clinton’s book, I’m not sure. He’s pretty well-versed on What Happened.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:

— It may rain during D.C.’s morning commute, but it should clear up later in the day. The Capital Weather Gang forecasts: “The chance of a lingering early-to-mid-morning shower is about the only weather inconvenience today, unless you count mostly cloudy morning skies. We should see skies brighten by mid-to-late afternoon, as highs reach near 80 to the low 80s with moderate humidity and light winds.”

— The Nationals lost to the Braves in an 8-0 rout. (Chelsea Janes)

— The DOJ announced that it would not pursue civil rights charges against the police officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death. Matt Zapotosky, Keith L. Alexander and Peter Hermann report: “In a news release, the Justice Department said its investigation had found ‘insufficient evidence’ to support charges in the case, and pointed to the high bar prosecutors would have had to meet to prove federal charges. … The decision likely forecloses any chance that the officers involved in Gray’s high-profile death will face criminal consequences[.]”

— The Petersen House, where Abraham Lincoln died, will close for six months of renovation beginning Christmas Day. (Michael E. Ruane)

VIDEOS OF THE DAY:

Jimmy Kimmel read the children’s book version of Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened”:

Hillary Clinton’s New Children’s Book “Losie the Pooh”

The Post’s Nicole Lewis fact-checked Trump’s claim that countries are unhappy with GDP growth rates of 7 to 8 percent:

Fact Check: Are foreign leaders telling Trump “they’re unhappy about 7 or 8 points of growth – GDP”?

Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who accepted the 2017 Freedom Award from the U.S. Capitol Historical Society this week, discussed the importance of arts education with The Post:

Lin-Manuel Miranda wants to bring arts funding back to the table at the Capitol

A celebrity telethon raised nearly $15 million for the victims of Harvey and Irma:

Celebrity telethon raises almost $15 million for Hurricane victims

And a Florida police officer helped ease one Irma victim’s concerns by dancing with her:

Deputy helps ease elderly woman’s Irma worries with adorable dance

Daily Dose of Media Bias -> One round for the Trump administration on its travel ban Daily Dose of Media Bias -> One round for the Trump administration on its travel ban…

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