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katyshannon

The Assassination Complex - 0 views

  • DRONES ARE A TOOL, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination.” This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, targeted killings.”
  • When the Obama administration has discussed drone strikes publicly, it has offered assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to boots on the ground and are authorized only when an “imminent” threat is present and there is “near certainty” that the intended target will be eliminated. Those terms, however, appear to have been bluntly redefined to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood meanings.
  • The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted more than 12 years ago, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes. Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an “area of active hostilities” if a target represents a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” without providing any sense of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried.
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  • The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on the shortcomings and flaws of the drone program, were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides.
  • The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source said.
  • Two sets of slides focus on the military’s high-value targeting campaign in Somalia and Yemen as it existed between 2011 and 2013, specifically the operations of a secretive unit, Task Force 48-4.
  • Additional documents on high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts of how the Obama administration masks the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets. The slides also paint a picture of a campaign in Afghanistan aimed not only at eliminating al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, but also at taking out members of other local armed groups.
  • One top-secret document shows how the terror “watchlist” appears in the terminals of personnel conducting drone operations, linking unique codes associated with cellphone SIM cards and handsets to specific individuals in order to geolocate them.
  • The ISR study also reveals new details about the case of a British citizen, Bilal el-Berjawi, who was stripped of his citizenship before being killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012. British and American intelligence had Berjawi under surveillance for several years as he traveled back and forth between the U.K. and East Africa, yet did not capture him. Instead, the U.S. hunted him down and killed him in Somalia.
  • Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington’s 14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an overreliance on signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and — due to a preference for assassination rather than capture — an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects.
  • They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by showing how the U.S. has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents, in the process exacerbating the very threat the U.S. is seeking to confront.
  • These secret slides help provide historical context to Washington’s ongoing wars, and are especially relevant today as the U.S. military intensifies its drone strikes and covert actions against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Those campaigns, like the ones detailed in these documents, are unconventional wars that employ special operations forces at the tip of the spear.
  • Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be unleashed, these documents lay bare the normalization of assassination as a central component of U.S. counterterrorism policy.
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    The Intercept's release of top-secret government documents detailing U.S. drone strikes in the Middle East and Africa.
bluekoenig

Gandhi's 1948 Assassination Shocked the World - Biography - 0 views

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    On this day in 1948 Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist who was unhappy with how he advocated for a bond between Hindu and Muslim Indians. It was just a year after he aided India in its quest for independence from Britain. Rioting ensued shortly after and many people desperately wanted to see his body before he was cremated. His killer and a coconspirator were arrested and killed a year later for the assassination.
rachelramirez

She Was the Cartel's Top Assassin. And Then Her Boyfriend Turned Her In. - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • She Was the Cartel’s Top Assassin. And Then Her Boyfriend Turned Her In.
  • The security forces burst into the house south of La Paz hoping they had finally caught up with Mexico’s murder queen, the cartel assassin-in-chief known as La China who is said to be responsible for more than 150 killings.
  • She continued a 10-year career in which she had killed her way from an ordinary hit woman to the leader of a squad of 50 murderers to the boss of the of Las Fuerzas Especiales de los Damaso, the “special forces” army of assassins founded by Damaso Lopez Nunez, aka El Licenciado.
hannahcarter11

US officials quiet on Iranian assassination amid fears of dangerous escalation - CNNPol... - 0 views

  • US officials told CNN they are closely monitoring fallout from the alleged assassination Friday of one of Iran's top nuclear scientists, which Iran blamed on Israel, but they are hesitant about speaking publicly about the issue to avoid further inflaming an already tense situation.
  • Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, viewed as one of the masterminds of Iran's controversial nuclear program, was assassinated by gunfire and explosives while riding in a vehicle east of Tehran.
  • Iran alleged that Israel is behind the assassination and called it an act of terrorism
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  • The attack comes weeks after the International Atomic Energy Agency, the top nuclear watchdog, said that Iran now has 12 times the amount of enriched uranium that is permitted under the 2015 nuclear accord.
  • President-elect Joe Biden has said he will renew efforts to negotiate with Tehran over its nuclear program when he takes office and any escalation following Fakhrizadeh's death would only complicate an already tough task.
  • Experts tell CNN that the episode underscores shifting dynamics in the Middle East as Trump leaves office and countries fearful of Iranian aggression ally together in solidarity against Iran.
  • "I think it goes without question that Israel did it," said Simon Henderson, Baker fellow at The Washington Institute and a specialist on Iran's nuclear program. "If you are Israel, you want to set the program back months if not years."
  • Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, tweeted that the attack was "an outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy between an incoming US administration and Iran. It's time for this ceaseless escalation to stop."
  • In a 2018 speech, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused the Iranian government of going out of its way to protect, hide and preserve him because he was so critical to their nuclear program.
  • The US military view right now is that unless there is a direct provocation against the United States by Iran, there is no justification for a US strike.
  • The US has currently just more than 50,000 troops in the region, which is not enough to carry out a sustained military campaign against Iran.
  • Pompeo spoke of the danger emanating from Iran and elsewhere during an interview broadcast on Fox News Thursday referencing the aftermath of the January strike by the United States that killed Soleimani.
  • CNN reported earlier this month that President Trump floated the idea of a military strike on Iran during the remaining days of his term but was dissuaded by senior officials. It's not clear if the administration would considering sabotage, cyber action or other clandestine alternatives were Trump to order up some sort of action.
Javier E

The assassination that could've sparked World War III - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Kennedy was in Springfield to campaign for Democrats running for House and Senate seats in the 1962 midterm elections. Before delivering a public speech at the Illinois State Fairgrounds, the president paid a private visit to Lincoln’s tomb. On his way to the tomb, an “employee of the Illinois Department of Public Safety” noticed two men along the president’s motorcade route with a rifle.
  • If Kennedy had been killed or wounded in Springfield, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and a core of advisers already leaning toward some type of airstrike or invasion of Cuba probably would have approved such an attack. An assassination attempt on a U.S. president amid an “eyeball to eyeball” confrontation with the Soviet Union would have led many officials to suspect Kremlin involvement. The Soviets had already been caught lying over the missiles in Cuba, and any Soviet denials regarding the attempted assassination of Kennedy would have been seen in the same light.
  • According to the Secret Service report, the alert public safety official “saw a rifle barrel with telescopic sight protruding from a second-story window. The local police took into custody and delivered to Special Agents of the Secret Service” two men who were brothers-in-law. The Secret Service noted that “a .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle and a full box of .22 long rifle ammunition was seized.” The men admitted “pointing the gun out the window on the parade route. However, they claimed that they had merely been testing the power of the telescopic sight to determine if it would be worthwhile to remove it in order to get a better look at the President when the motorcade returned.
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  • An enraged public and a core group of advisers predisposed to think the worst of Soviet intentions would have exerted enormous pressure upon Johnson to respond with force.
Javier E

After Boris Nemtsov's Assassination, 'There Are No Longer Any Limits' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Putin’s aggressive foreign policy, his increasingly conservative domestic policy, his labeling the opposition a “fifth column” and “national traitors,” his state television whipping up a militant, nationalistic fervor — all of this creates a certain atmosphere. Putin, after all, has a history of playing with fire, only to have the flames get away from him. After years of the Kremlin tacitly supporting ultranationalist, neo-Nazi groups, the same skinheads staged a violent protest at the foot of the Kremlin walls in 2010 while riot police officers stood by and watched helplessly. Today, a rabid nationalism has swallowed up most of the country, and it is no longer clear that Putin can control it. “In this kind of atmosphere, everything is possible,” Pavlovsky told me. “This is a Weimar atmosphere. There are no longer any limits.”
  • Nemtsov’s assassination took that warning to its logical conclusion. Now, “we live in a different political reality,” tweeted Leonid Volkov, a prominent opposition activist. “The fact that they killed him is a message to frighten everyone, the brave and the not brave,” Yashin said. “That this is what happens to people who go against the government of our country.” Anatoly Chubais — who, like Nemtsov, served in the Yeltsin government, and who remains close to Putin — visited the site of the shooting this morning. “If, just a few days ago, people in our city are carrying signs that say ‘Let’s finish off the fifth column,’ and today they kill Nemtsov,” he said in a statement, referring to the Kremlin-sponsored anti-Maidan protest in Moscow last weekend, “what will happen tomorrow?” Or, as Albats put it, “Hunting season is open.”
alexdeltufo

In Sarajevo, Divisions That Drove an Assassin Have Only Begun to Heal - The New York Times - 0 views

  • firing the shots that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, and setting off World War I.
  • But for all the excited chatter among the tourists on the sidewalk where the 19-year-old Princip fired his Browning semiautomatic pistol, killing the 50-year-old heir to the Hapsburg throne
  • As Europe diligently promotes an ideology of harmony, broad areas of the continent, the Middle East and elsewhere continue to struggle
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  • The archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began,
  • Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day’s formalities through.
  • The sepia photographs in glass cases at the museum show Princip as a slight, whispery-mustached man with staring eyes, otherwise forgettable in his homespun jacket and collarless shirt.
  • He told the Sarajevo court empaneled hastily to try him and his fellow conspirators that he had lost hope
  • presenting Princip his victims at close range.
  • on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia,
  • As a result of the political tug of war, commemorations of the assassination, like so much else in Bosnia, have been divided along sectarian lines.
  • So it is small wonder that the centenary has revived the passions that made Bosnia a hotbed of violence in both world wars and again in the 1990s. In the last conflict, a vote by Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992
  • in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs,
  • which will be broadcast live in 40 countries, is the centerpiece of a two-week program of conferences, concerts, poetry readings, plays and sporting performances whose organizers are determined not to take sides in the Princip dispute.
  • Balkan Serbs in a “greater Serbia” once the colonial hold of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans had been broken.
  • Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense
  • Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe.
  • After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union
  • To a reporter returning to Sarajevo for the first time since the siege of the early 1990s, the evidence of a new beginning is palpable. Even in driving rain, bars and restaurants are
  • ommunities account for a majority of the players. When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines,
  • Visegrad, whose population was once two-thirds Muslim, is overwhelmingly Serb now.
  • Mr. Kusturica has overseen the construction of a $20 million model village, Andricgrad, based on old Serb traditions.
  • “Gavrilo Princip was our national pride, a revolutionary who helped us to get rid of slavery,” he told visitors from Sarajevo as some 200 workers hastened about under a mosaic of Princip and his fellow conspirators, putting the final touches on the village.
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    John F. Burns 
manhefnawi

The Murder of le roi Henri | History Today - 0 views

  • The queen of France, Marie de’ Medici, had been crowned the previous day at the basilica of Saint Denis and was due to make her formal entry into the capital.
  • French queens were not crowned as a matter of course and Henry IV, king of France since 1589, saw no reason to go to the expense of a coronation for his second queen whom he had married in 1610
  • The alarm was shared by France, which had been at war with the Habsburg empire for much of the 16th century. Religion was also involved, as the Catholic Habsburgs were opposed by many German Protestant princes. Henry IV was urged to intervene militarily, but he had hesitated initially.
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  • At a series of council meetings in February 1610 the king and his ministers planned to invade Flanders in the spring
  • Henry IV was visiting his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, at the Hôtel Schomberg in Paris when Chastel drew his knife, wounding him in the lip.Chastel did not try to escape, confessed and was duly executed
  • There was also much pointing of fingers after Henry IV’s assassination
  • Had they not been responsible for the assassination of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, in 1584 and for the Gunpowder Plot in England in 1605? They were also seen as the hidden force that had inspired Jacques Clément, the Jacobin friar who had fatally stabbed Henry III in 1589
  • Henry IV is remembered as one of the most popular kings of France
  • The Edict of Nantes of April 1598 is commonly seen, albeit inaccurately, as an act of toleration that enabled Catholics and Protestants to live side by side in peace.
  • It was in 1584 on the death of François Duke of Anjou, the younger brother of Henry III, that Henry, king of Navarre became heir presumptive to the French throne. Under Salic Law, women were debarred from the line of succession, but the situation was not clear-cut, for the king of France had always been a Catholic and Henry of Navarre was a Huguenot
  • chose a rival candidate in the person of the old and ineffectual Cardinal Charles de Bourbon
  • When Henry III, who was childless, was himself assassinated in 1589 the succession problem became acute. Though Henry of Navarre was rightfully heir under the Salic Law, as a Protestant he had literally to fight his way to the throne
  • Following the death of the Cardinal of Bourbon in 1590, whom the Leaguers had acclaimed as King Charles X, they toyed with the idea of setting aside the Salic Law and having a Spanish Infanta, Isabella Clara Eugenia, as queen
  • Even after he had made peace with Spain (in 1598) and Savoy (in 1601), their rulers continued to stir up trouble among the great nobles in France
  • Coming to terms with Spain, she married off her son, the boyking Louis XIII, to a Spanish princess, Anne, the daughter of Philip II of Spain
millerco

Trump plans to release classified JFK documents - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump said Saturday he intends to allow the release of classified government documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy "subject to the receipt of further information."
  • A White House official told reporters Saturday: "The President believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise."
  • "Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened," Trump said, appearing to leave open the possibility that some documents could still be withheld.
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  • Trump's tweet comes as he is staring down an October 26 deadline set in law by Congress mandating the public release of the still-secret documents -- including FBI and CIA files -- barring any action by the President to block the release of certain documents.
  • The White House said in a statement to Politico earlier this week that the White House was working "to ensure that the maximum amount of data can be released to the public" by next week's deadline.
  • Trump himself is no stranger to the controversies and conspiracy theories that have long swirled around the assassination of the 35th president.
  • During the 2016 campaign, Trump made the unfounded claim that the father of GOP rival Sen. Ted Cruz was associated with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, a claim he has never reneged nor apologized for.
carolinehayter

Capitol rioters intended to 'capture and assassinate' elected, US prosecutors say - CNN... - 0 views

  • Federal prosecutors offered the most chilling description yet of rioters who seized the Capitol last week, writing in a new court filing that the intention was "to capture and assassinate elected officials."
  • The view was included in a memo seeking to keep Jacob Anthony Chansley, who rallied people inside the Capitol using a bullhorn, in detention.
  • "Strong evidence, including Chansley's own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States government," government prosecutors wrote.
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  • In a separate case, prosecutors in Texas court alleged that a retired Air Force reservist who carried plastic zip tie-like restraints on the Senate floor may have intended to restrain lawmakers
  • "He loved Trump, every word. He listened to him. He felt like he was answering the call of our president," Chansley's attorney Al Watkins, appearing on CNN Thursday night, said. " My client wasn't violent. He didn't cross over any police lines. He didn't assault anyone." Watkins said Chansley also hopes for a presidential pardon.
  • In court, prosecutors "argued that Mr. Brock intended to use the zip-ties to restrain those he viewed as enemies -- presumably, federal lawmakers, who had moments before been evacuated from the chamber,"
  • said the Vice President was a "child-trafficking traitor" and went on a long diatribe about Pence, Biden and other politicians as traitors.
  • Prosecutors describe those who took over the Capitol as "insurrectionists" and offer new details about Chansley's role in the violent siege last week, including that after standing at the dais where Vice President Mike Pence had stood that morning, Chansley wrote a note saying "it's only a matter of time, justice is coming.
  • Prosecutors say Larry Rendell Brock, a 53-year-old retired Air Force Reserve officer who was arrested in Texas, was photographed roaming the Senate chamber clutching a white flex cuff, which is used by law enforcement to restrain or detain subjects.
  • Prosecutors accuse Chansley of being a flight risk who can quickly raise money through non-traditional means as "one of the leaders and mascots of QAnon, a group commonly referred to as a cult (which preaches debunked and fictitious anti-government conspiracy theory)."
  • Now-viral photos show the man prosecutors have identified as Brock sporting a military helmet, green tactical vest and black-and-camo jacket.
  • A magistrate judge on Thursday released Brock to home confinement with electronic monitoring and limits on interacting with others involved in the riot and barred him from possessing guns or accessing social media.
  • According to court filings, prosecutors allege that Brock posted on Facebook about buying body armor and a helmet for a "civil war" and believed the US election was being certified by a "hostile governing force."
  • He repeated President Donald Trump's baseless assertions of election fraud.
  • He said he had picked the restraints off the ground and intended to give them back to a police officer.
anonymous

U.S. Says Rioters At Capitol Aimed 'To Capture And Assassinate Elected Officials' : Ins... - 0 views

  • Members of the pro-Trump mob that staged an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last week intended "to capture and assassinate elected officials,
  • Chansley wore horns, face paint and fur as he stood on the Senate dais – where he left a threatening note for Vice President Pence, prosecutors say."It's only a matter of time, justice is coming,"
  • The note was left at the spot where, moments earlier, Pence had been poised to preside over a joint session to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory over President Trump. Chansley told the FBI he believes Pence is a "child-trafficking traitor."
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  • The U.S. attorney's office in Arizona filed the memorandum Thursday as part of its argument against releasing Chansley while his case proceeds.
  • Chansley is charged with two felonies: obstructing the conduct of a law enforcement officer and obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors say that as he committed those actions, Chansley was also carrying a dangerous weapon – specifically, "a six-foot spear."
  • Prosecutors say Chansley should remain in custody for a variety of reasons, including his part in the riot and his avowed intent to return to Washington to protest Biden's upcoming inauguration.
  • The U.S. attorney's office also says that Chansley would not likely conform to court-imposed conditions on his release, noting that while in custody, he has refused to eat anything other than organic food. Prosecutors also note that Chansley has shown he can travel without being traced. And because he is widely associated with the horns-and-fur costume and face paint he wore at the Capitol, prosecutors say, Chansley "is virtually unidentifiable when not wearing it."
  • The memorandum, like other documents prosecutors have filed in Chansley's case, notes he refers to himself and other rioters as "patriots."
  • It notes Chansley's status as a "shaman" within QAnon, which the prosecutors variously define as "a dangerous extremist group ... founded on an imaginary conspiracy theory," and a cult that "preaches debunked and fictitious anti-government conspiracy theories that a deep state is out to take down the current administration."
  • "Strong evidence, including Chansley's own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States Government. "
  • Prosecutors also note that Chansley sought to mislead officials about his drug use. While he allegedly claimed to be a weekly user of marijuana, they note, he has described using peyote and mushrooms in his podcast (on which he uses the name "Jake Angeli"),
  • "Chansley has spoken openly about his belief that he is an alien, a higher being, and he is here on Earth to ascend to another reality."
  • Chansley and dozens of others who breached security at the Capitol have been arrested in the past week. In many cases, they have been identified by citizens and authorities from photos and videos taken inside lawmakers' offices and other areas in the congressional complex.
  • The attack on the Capitol has been linked to five deaths, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and a woman whom police shot as she climbed up a barricaded door.
  • "Media and FBI reports have detailed carefully-planned insurrection attempts scheduled throughout the country in the coming weeks at every state capital, including the [Arizona] capitol."
  • Arguing that Chansley poses a flight risk, the court filing says he does not have a stable job that would require him to remain in Arizona.
sidneybelleroche

Haiti prosecutor seeks charges against PM Ariel Henry in connection with president's as... - 0 views

  • Haiti's top prosecutor is seeking charges against Prime Minister Ariel Henry in connection with the assassination of the late President Jovenel Moise.
  • Bedford Claude previously invited Henry to testify about the case, citing evidence that a key suspect in the assassination called him in the hours after the murder
  • That suspect, former Haitian Justice Ministry official Joseph Felix Badio, is currently believed to be on the run.
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  • he is discussing possible charges against Henry with the judge.
Javier E

Opinion | Joan Didion, RFK's Assassination and Why "The White Album" Still Feels So Rel... - 0 views

  • Kennedy’s casket was transported by rail to Washington, and along the tracks nearly two million people lined up to pay their respects. To Ms. Didion, the contrast between these scenes and the Royal Hawaiian’s conspicuously deserted verandah felt appalling. With Robert Kennedy’s assassination, she said, “it was as if all the disturbances of the whole past couple of years came to a head that night. And here was a whole part of America that wasn’t having it.” As she and Mr. Dunne watched the news coverage, she told Ms. Stein, “it was like something snapping.”
  • Ms. Didion found herself confronted with a fractured version of America that’s not too different from the one we’ve come to recognize today. Millions are dead from the pandemic. Thousands take to the streets in protest while thousands more gather in the national capital to storm the seat of government.
  • “No matter what your political feelings are, if you’re attached to the idea of the nation as a community — if you feel yourself to be part of that community — then obviously something has happened to that community,” Ms. Didion told Ms. Stein of that night in 1968
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  • We are at a continual deficit of either unity or cohesion. And in the wake of each new cataclysm, we’ve found ourselves further apart.
  • “It seemed as if these people did not count themselves as part of the community. That they came from another America.” They could heckle a praying singer. They could watch “The Lawrence Welk Show” but ignore a political assassination. The same economic system that put these specific Americans in the position to take this vacation — the white-collar stability, the inequality sustaining it — was what allowed them, now, to turn their backs. They didn’t really care about any of it; the broader narrative of patriotism and pride was just an excuse for doing what they wanted — for their self-interest — a narrative they could apply and discard from one situation to the next as they saw fit.
  • “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wrote — and, later in the essay, “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it,” recounting “a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
  • “The White Album” clarifies something essential to our current experience: what it’s like to navigate our fractured cultural landscape when it can feel so difficult to talk to each other, because we lack the sense of a shared reality on which such a conversation depends
  • That sense of “the final unraveling,” as Mr. Dunne described it, often feels like it’s currently underway.
  • For Ms. Didion, there was no overarching narrative we could rely on either to magically put things back together or to predict how it all might finally fall apart. “Writing has not yet helped me to see what it means,” she wrote in the essay’s final line.
Javier E

Why killing "criminals" with drones is a war crime. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine - 0 views

  • Of course, there's a lot of controversy over the percentage of noncombatants killed in the drone strikes. One study, not very convincingly, puts civilian casualties at slightly above 3 percent. Another says 10 percent, another a full one-third, Brookings far more. Do these different numbers yield different moral conclusions? Are the drone strikes defensible at 4 percent murdered innocents but indefensible at 33 percent? There's no algorithm that synchs up the degree of target importance, the certainty of intelligence that's based on, and potential civilian casualties from the attack. It's a question that's impossible to answer with precision. Which suggests that when murdering civilians is involved, you don't do it at all.
  • so-called "just war" principles have not been given much weight by the Obama Justice Department, which has glossed over or ignored them in giving its sanction to stepped-up drone warfare. The two key "just war" principles are "distinction" and "proportionality." Distinction means that an act of war is illegitimate if it does not at least attempt to make a distinction between military and noncombatant civilian casualties. Nukes obviously don't, can't
  • The "foes" in Afghanistan do not wear uniforms. I'm not saying all Taliban look alike, but the pious believers don't look very different from the "provincial commanders." Some have called the whole drone program "targeted assassination" that violates even U.S. prohibitions, especially when carried out by the CIA, which was supposed to be prohibited from carrying out assassinations.
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  • proportionality requires that the use of lethal force be justified by the imminence and danger of the threat, for which there is no evidence in the clips and likely only useless CIA intel to back it up.
  • Putative war crimes, repellant videos, porn mentality, the counterproductive creation of generations of terrorists: On grounds both moral and practical, the drone attacks must cease.
Javier E

History News Network | What Makes People Do What They Do? - 0 views

  • what about us "experts?" What have we learned? Are there really any significant new insights? Do we know much more today than we did a generation ago?
  • France uplifted the downtrodden people of Algeria and Indo-China
  • My generation was deeply influenced half a century ago by economists and mathematicians. We scholars all wanted to be - and particularly to show -- that we had mastered all the techniques of our professions as social scientists, that we could build models, make graphs, juxtapose trends, etc. After all, we were writing our learned books and essays for our academic colleagues and our paymasters, not for those we were describing. So, at least those who were paid by our government and its proxy think tanks often became, as the English say, "too clever by half." They and their counterparts in universities, after all, had to prove their "smarts" in order to get funded, promoted or kept on
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  • The basic question we face is, I suggest, what makes people do what they do?
  • I will offer a few suggestions in the following six categories. There may well be others, but these are mine. Top of the list, I think, is ignorance. Closely following ignorance is the issue of memory. Next, I suggest is suspicion. Somewhere down the line is escapism. "Why didn't we..." and "why do you remind us...." Then, there is the development process and its downside, corruption. Hard to "objectify" and impossible to "quantify," is my fifth category, the sense of identify. Finally, I reflect on the sense of dignity and its and itsviolation in shameandthe terrible burden of embarrassment.
  • Every survey on what Americans know about our world shows, objectively speaking, what can only be described as ignorance.  Few Americans know even where any foreign place is, who lives there, what language they speak, or what shapes their daily lives.
  • Casual conversations with people all over America indicate that few care. Such information is just not a significant part of their lives.
  • If one could have taken a poll in England at almost any time in its history one would have found the same results.  I suggest that what is different, operationally, is that in England the ordinary citizen did not play a role in determining policy.  That was the job of the small aristocracy. What the people knew or did not know was unimportant.
  • above all in America, which is the operational head of the world community, what "the people" know or don't know but believe is no longer irrelevant. It sometimes is crucial. That is because elections are more common, even if not always free, and because people almost everywhere, but particularly in the West, have been to some extent politicized. Thus, Ignorance is not new but today it is often determinant.
  • ignorance is not just unidirectional; it occurs in a context. What "we" think we know about others fits into what other people think "they" know both about themselves and about us. People everywhere tend to know quite a bit about their own circumstances and the actions that shaped those circumstances. That is, much more than foreigners know about them. This necessarily creates a lopsided worldview
  • These forms of mutual incomprehension or mutual misreadings often cause wars. Consider three examples:
  • Dirty tricks like our attempt to murder Nasser were and probably still are not uncommon. The Senate Committee headed by Senator Frank Church provided a chilling record, including cooperation with the Mafia, to assassinate Fidel Castro. Assassinations and attempted assassinations by the Russians, the British, the Israelis and others have been less subjected to sustained inquiry than Church provided, but their involvement in many deplorable incidents is not in doubt.
  • Britain developed Iran
  • The ancient Hindu who told the parable of the elephant was right. Those who grab the tail cannot understand those who handle the trunk. Understanding of the whole is always and everywhere necessary for intelligent action.
  • for how long does memory prevent people from doing the same things again?
  • long-term memory, memory of big happenings like wars, may be crucial but, it seems to me, last only about a decade.  Who today remembers much about American participation in the wars in Greece, Korea or even Vietnam.
  • Even when we get the sequences right, we usually stop short of determining the causes, that is, the connections between events.
  • my hunch is that as rapidly as we can, we put aside what we don't want to remember.
  • we have been able virtually to remove costly and painful events from the immediacy of daily life
  • Those who dwell on the costly and painful aspects of rising militarism are at best a nuisance who soon wear out their welcome. We find it so much easier to mesh our thoughts and attitudes with those of the people with whom we eat, work, sleep and play.  Better not to pay attention to those who challenge "conventional wisdom" or buck the tide.
  • Conventional wisdom and going with the mainstream are, arguably, necessary to make society function.
  • Sometimes, it seems to me that our questions get in the way of our answers and that our analytical tools themselves distort what our eyes are seeing.  We get so sophisticated that we may, to use the old saw, fail to see the forest for the trees.
  • These activities have created throughout the world a pervasive sense of illegality and immorality. And it cannot be restricted just to foreign affairs. It spills over into domestic affairs not only, as it commonly does, into societies with fragile legal systems but also into ours.
  • What is important, I suggest about all these -- and many other suspicious events which have never been fully illuminated -- is two fold: on the one hand, a climate of suspicion has been created that makes the achievement of security and peace far more difficult throughout the world and, on the other hand, trust in government, including the government of the United States, has been compromised.
  • Johnson charged Nixon with treason, but did not hold him accountable. Johnson's successors in the presidency have, similarly, not applied to political leaders the sort of legal standard to which we, as citizens, are held. Nor have they shared with the citizenry what they know has been done in our name. This is a fundamental attack on our system of government. Those who have "blown the whistle" on such activities, not the perpetrators, have been stigmatized or punished.
  • This adds up, I suggest, to a political form of corruption even worse than the financial corruption that so corrodes the nation "salvation" activities we have mounted in such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • What about escapism?  I suggest that escapism is the child of suspicion. I would wager that if one could stop a hundred or so people on the streets of any village, town or city almost everywhere, he would find that only a handful of those he badgered would want to talk about issues some of us keep warning them that could ruin their lives. Most Americans and probably most people everywhere, simply do not want to think about them.
  • I have found that when such issues as war, environmental degradation, over population, hunger, pandemics, nuclear accidents or even financial collapse are raised, conversation dwindles. As the familiar expression has it, "eyes glaze over," and as quickly as politely possible, Americans flee from the person who raised the issues as though he had made a bad smell
  • For most people they are better kept at least out of sight if not totally out of mind. Real life, enjoyable life, life that gives amusement or pleasure right now is at hand. It is available even for the very poor on television.  Sports, even in countries where hunger is widespread, jobs few, life constricted and governments oppressive, these annoyances recede before the immediate excitement of football.
  • we think we are the doctors but really we are the disease. I don't want to believe that, but there is ample proof that much of what we have done with the best of intentions has made many people suffer
  • we all sought in the late 1950s and early 1960 to "objectify" and "quantify" the study of international affairs.
  • Insofar as it dealt with the struggles in the Third World, our analysis suggested to some of us that what we were seeking came down to achieving a growth rate of about 3.5 percent
  • It seems to me that to the degree possible, everything must be done to avoid attacks on dignity and humiliation.
  • So, what is a sense of identity, how is it manifested and how do outsiders relate to it?
  • when the first cities were formed about 3,000 years ago, the inhabitants became too numerous to identify themselves by kinship. So, they elaborated their sense of belonging into custom, religion, dress, diet and language. Gradually, and over centuries, they often elaborated their definition of their identity
  • whatever form "belonging" takes, it is the "glue" that hold societies together and make it possible for the members to live together.
  • What the residents needed was to stay put, to improve their housing, of course, but more important to be assisted in taking charge of their lives in their own pattern and at their own speed.
  • For me, this experience threw into relief the American efforts to remake other societies as the neoconservatives urge. Their proposals urge not only to "regime change" but also to "culture change" -- indeed to disassemble -- whole societies. As played out, particularly during the George W. Bush administration, they have caused or exacerbated unrest and war. To the degree we insist on overturning what the people believe to be normal and right -- in effect of undermining the sense of identity, belonging and self-respect even to improve their physical well-being -- we can expect unrest and war to continue
  • For what we have done, even with statistically proven improvements and with the best of intentions, both we and they have paid and will pay more. The Third and mainly Islamic world is now in revolt.
  • Last, and closely related to the sense of belonging and identity, I suggest is the deep need of human beings to avoid attacks on their dignity
  • Close analysis of almost any confrontation shows that it sets the parameters within which rulers have to act or are likely to be overthrown. We neglect it at our peril.
  • What had happened was that, unwittingly, the governments, at our urging and with our help, had undermined the fundamental "possession" of their peoples, their sense of identity.
  • Avoiding humiliation is the essence of diplomacy. But when one has overwhelming power, the temptation is always present to push one's advantage, to put the other person in the corner, to make him "blink," to humble him, even to destroy him.
runlai_jiang

JFK files: Trump teases release as deadline arrives - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • to invoke his waiver privilege to keep some of the documents secret, as some members of the US intelligence community have privately requested.
  • In a Saturday tweet, Trump said he would allow the release of the documents "subject to the release of further information."
  • Trump could block the release of certain documents if he finds "an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement or conduct of foreign relations" and if "the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure,"
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  • Historians who have closely studied the Kennedy assassination have said they do not expect the documents to reveal any bombshells or to contradict the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for killing Kennedy
  • The President's longtime political adviser Roger Stone, an avid JFK assassination conspiracy theorist, also privately urged Trump to allow the full release of the documents.
manhefnawi

Napoleon III, Lord Palmerston and the Entente Cordiale | History Today - 0 views

  • In July 1830, the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in France ousted Charles X and the Second Bourbon Restoration, and a new era in Anglo-French relations ensued. The terms set down at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 following Napoleon’s defeat were now considered academic. Britain, as victor against France, had been obliged to uphold the articles of the various treaties, designed, as one of them stated, for the purpose of ‘maintaining the order of things re-established in France’. The quasi-constitutional Orleans monarchy of Charles X’s successor Louis-Philippe was therefore recognised by Britain
  • In a diplomatic dispatch of 1832, Lord Granville, British ambassador in Paris, noted that Perier, then president of the Council, believed that ‘the welfare of France and England and the peace of Europe depended upon an intimate alliance and concert between the two governments’
  • By 1848, once more heading foreign affairs (June 1846 to December 1851), the ‘Jupiter Anglicanus of the Foreign Office’ allowed Anglo-French relations to sink to a level not witnessed since 1814. He had orchestrated the creation of Belgium in 1831, a supposedly neutral country but one which would naturally  be pro-British and often anti-French
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  • Five years later he had attempted to manipulate the outcome of the marriage of Isabella II of Spain against French interests in order to align Britain with a liberal Spain
  • In February 1848, a new revolution in Paris threatened to upset Anglo-French relations altogether
  • he Second Republic was therefore seen as unstable and potentially militaristic, and Palmerston’s reaction was to issue a confidential  paper outlining government preparations for an imminent invasion of Britain
  • There was considerable relief in London, then, when in October the political body in France agreed to usher in a republic under the authority of a president elected for four years by universal adult manhood suffrage. The future of Anglo-French relations would now hinge  on the identity of the new president
  • In December, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew to the great defeated enemy of England, was elected first president of the Second Republic, gaining 74.3 per cent of the 7,449,471 votes cast in metropolitan France
  • In Britain, initial reaction to the news was mixed. Louis-Napoléon had spent three years in exile in England between 1831 and 1848, and over five separate visits had acquired a respect for, and knowledge of, the country unrivalled among European heads of state
  • The sepoy revolt in India in May 1857 could hardly be blamed on Napoleon III, but in some quarters the suggestion was made that he was secretly helping them. A short visit to Osborne in August to meet the Queen and Palmerston put the matter straight (though none there had believed it).
  • When the French navy was not seen to be steaming up the Thames the panic dissipated, but the fears were resurrected after Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 2nd, 1851, dissolving the National Assembly and declaring a new constitution. Opinion polarised both in France and Britain; on the one hand Louis-Napoléon was declared a ‘saviour of society’ and on the other the ‘Antichrist’
  • even the Queen hoped that Louis-Napoléon’s enemies abroad would remain ‘perfectly passive’. But the press and its public were united in bitter condemnation. By January 1852, the poet Coventry Patmore had persuaded nineteen friends to form the first Rifle Club as part of a nation-wide army of volunteers to repel, as he put it later, ‘the threats of the French colonels and by suspicions of the intentions of Louis-Napoléon
  • The second invasion panic did not subside until a formal alliance was established in March 1854, preceding the Crimean War. In April 1855 the Emperor Napoleon III (as Louis-Napoléon had declared himself in December 1852) enjoyed a successful state visit to Britain, reciprocated by an equally successful visit by Victoria to Paris in August. Throughout the Crimean War, Napoleon III allowed Britain to lead affairs
  • personal relations between Palmerston and Napoleon III continued to deteriorate throughout the early 1860s
  • The incident most dangerous to Franco-British relations occurred on January 14th, 1858, when an attempt was made to assassinate Napoleon III in the streets of Paris, the plot hatched in London by political refugees
  • But popular opinion in England remained suspicious of the Second Republic, and the economic upturn was accompanied by the first of three intense ‘invasion panics’, which recalled to mind those set in motion many years earlier by Napoleon I
  • Outright war between France and England might have resulted had two different players been involved: Napoleon III apologised to Lord Cowley, Britain’s ambassador in Paris, for having overlooked the jingoistic pronouncements in Le Moniteur universel, while Palmerston attempted to introduce a Conspiracy Bill, which would have elevated the crime of conspiring to murder persons abroad from a misdemeanour to a felony.
  • To Napoleon III from Queen Victoria’ promised to him in 1855 but somehow ‘forgotten’. The entente had been saved by an imperial whisker
  • In the wake of the assassination attempt Napoleon III was keen to demonstrate that his improvements to the naval base at Cherbourg were not a threat to Britain, and in August 1858 he invited Victoria and Albert, several politicians and naval men, to inspect them as a mark of trust.
  • The third invasion panic, the following year, originated in Napoleon III’s military attempt in May 1859 to oust Habsburg influence in Italy and prepare the peninsula for some form of unification and self-government
  • France’s annexation of Nice and Savoy in 1860 as a reward from Piedmont-Sardinia following the war in Italy was wholeheartedly approved by the local populace in a referendum
  • Napoleon III’s attempt to set up by direct intervention a European monarchy in Mexico from October 1861 (when a French, Spanish and British naval fleet worked in concert to extract the payment of debts from a corrupt Mexican administration) was approved by Palmerston but again vigorously opposed by Albert and all the royal family – and was unpopular in Britain, although offset by several other actions. Napoleon III’s vigorous support of free trade resulted in the pioneering Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 which, while it undoubtedly harmed a minority of trades, vastly improved the majority, increasing prosperity and mutual trust
  • Napoleon III was careful to appear subservient, enabling Palmerston to acknowledge that the British ‘throughout had their own way and ... led the way’
  • The Duruz were the aggressors in this instance, and thousands of Christians were killed during a period resolved only through French diplomacy, Turkish aid and Algerian sympathy
  • Napoleon III reacted by sighing that once he used to say ‘avec Lord Palmerston on peut faire les grandes choses’ but now he seemed determined to prevent him doing anything at all
  • The most bizarre was that Napoleon III was looking for the nephew of Marie Cantillon, a man who had attempted to assassinate the Duke of Wellington in Paris in 1818, to pay him money Napoléon I had bequeathed Cantillon in his recently published will
  • Napoleon III’s attempt to set up a European monarchy in Mexico was his only independent action undertaken in the 1860s to meet with Palmerston’s general approval, but only for what the scheme potentially meant for British trade
  • Following military defeat by Prussia and deposition by Parisian ideologues in 1870, Napoleon III died in England on January 9th, 1873.
  • Gladstone soon came to terms with the new Third French Republic, and the rest of Europe again took Britain’s lead in officially recognising the new French regime
  • The Napoleonic wars did not end at Waterloo, but in Paris in the hands of Napoleon III. Punch stated why on January 18th, 1873
millerco

Ted Cruz: A Pressure Point for North Korea - The New York Times - 0 views

  • On Oct. 31, the State Department faces a critical decision in our relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
  • The Iran-Russia-North Korea sanctions bill enacted in August included legislation I introduced that requires the secretary of state to decide whether to relist North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism within 90 days.
  • Look at the accusations against Pyongyang: the unspeakable treatment of Otto Warmbier; the assassination of a member of the Kim family with chemical weapons on foreign soil; collusion with Iran to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; cyberattacks on American film companies; support for Syria’s chemical weapons program; arms sales to Hezbollah and Hamas; and attempts to assassinate dissidents in exile. Given this, the decision should be easy.
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  • In fact, Americans could be forgiven for wondering why North Korea is not already designated as a sponsor of terrorism.
  • Aside from the many stringent limitations a terrorism-sponsor designation imposes on a state, the label serves as a formal indication from the United States that any positive development of diplomatic relations is contingent on abandoning the financing and support of terrorism.
  • On Feb. 13, 2007, the State Department signed a deal with North Korea in pursuit of a grand bargain: exchanging Pyongyang’s promise of eventual denuclearization for Washington’s guarantees for full diplomatic recognition.
  • It used to be — and the story behind the decision to remove that designation nearly 10 years ago is the key to understanding America’s failed assumptions about North Korea, how they led to Pyongyang obtaining its nuclear arsenal, and why the United States needs to reverse its approach and relist Pyongyang immediately.
  • Standing in the way, however, was a decision President Ronald Reagan made nearly 20 years earlier, designating North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism largely in response to its complicity in a 1987 plane bombing that killed 115 people.
  • Indeed, the State Department linked Pyongyang’s ties to terrorist groups and its nuclear program as a rationale for maintaining the terror designation in 2005.
  • wo years later, Israel destroyed a nuclear reactor believed to have been built with North Korean help in Syria, a designated state sponsor of terrorism. Although all this was understood at the time, the United States elected to delist North Korea in 2008 — and in so doing, again fell back into its pattern of misunderstanding rogue regimes.
  • When North Korea reneged on its promise to forgo nuclear weapons in the early 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s administration put together the “Agreed Framework” that paved Pyongyang’s path to nuclearization. When North Korea’s leader at the time, Kim Jong-il, withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003, confirming that he intended to build a nuclear weapon, President George W. Bush pushed for the China-led six-party talks with North Korea.
  • When the country tested its second nuclear weapon in 2009, President Barack Obama opted for “strategic patience.”
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