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The report’s conclusion: This is “the only viable strategy.”

There will probably be more than one curve.

Initially leery of alarming the public, they have increasingly compared this pandemic to the 1918 flu pandemic, the deadliest in modern history. It infected roughly a third of the world’s population and killed at least 50 million people, including at least 675,000 in the United States.Like the bumpy hills some foresee in coming months, the 1918 pandemic hit America in three waves — a mild one that spring, the deadliest wave in fall and a final one that winter.

if authorities ease some measures in coming months or if we start letting them slip ourselves, that hill could easily turn right back into the exponential curve that has cratered Italy’s health system and that U.S. officials are desperately trying to avoid replicating

One reason she and others are alarmed: In China, the fatality rate in Wuhan, the raging epicenter, was 5.8 percent. But in all other areas of the country it was 0.7 percent — a signal that most deaths were driven by an overwhelmed health system.

If we’re lucky, the coming months will probably look less like a mountain and more like a string of bumpy hills, say epidemiologists

The crisis brought out the best in Baltimoreans — with sewing circles churning out gauze masks and hospital bedding, and neighbors donating food and services. But it also brought out the worst — xenophobic conspiracy theories that nurses of “German extraction” were deliberately infecting people. African American patients were kept out of most hospitals under Jim Crow-era segregation.

“Pandemics aren’t just physical,” said Schoch-Spana. “They bring with them an almost shadow pandemic of psychological and societal injuries as well.”

But the pandemic has revealed a dearth of reliable data about the key parts of the nation’s health-care system now under assault. That leaves decision-makers operating in the dark

Given the limitations, The Washington Post assembled data to analyze the availability of the critical-care resources needed to treat severely ill patients who require extended hospitalization. The Post conducted a stress test of sorts on available resources, which revealed a patchwork of possible preparedness shortcomings in cities and towns where the full force of the virus has yet to hit and where people may not be following isolation and social distancing orders.

More than half of the nation’s population lives in areas that are less prepared than New York City, where in early April officials scrambled to add more ICU beds and find extra ventilators amid a surge of covid-19 patients.

To compare available resources across the country, The Post examined a year-long scenario in which the coronavirus would sicken 20 percent of U.S. adults, and about 20 percent of those infected would require hospitalization

Under that scenario, about 11 million adults would need hospitalization for nearly two weeks, and almost 2.5 million would require intensive care.

This level of hospitalization is considered by Harvard researchers to be a conservative outcome for the pandemic, while others have described it as severe.

about 76 million people, or 30 percent of the nation’s adult population, live in areas where the number of available ICU beds would not be enough to satisfy the demand of virus patients. The scenario for ventilator availability is even more dire: Nearly half of the adult population lives in regions where the demand would exceed the supply.

We need to know where our weapons are. We need to coordinate all of that,” said Retsef Levi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor leading a health-care data initiative called the COVID-19 Policy Alliance. “This is a war.”

Kahn likened the task of evaluating the current readiness of the U.S. health-care system to peering into a dark room.

“We’re outside of it, and we’re all looking through different keyholes and seeing different aspects of it,” he said. “But there’s no way to just open the door and turn on the lights, because of how fragmented the data are. And that is a really, really depressing thing at all times, let alone during a pandemic, that we don’t have an ability to look at these things.”

Bergamo, as the ground zero of the Italian outbreak, was beset by ICU bed and ventilator shortages. “We think Italy may be the most comparable area to the United States, at this point, for a variety of reasons,” Vice President Pence said April 1 in a CNN interview.

The MIT research group, the COVID-19 Policy Alliance, has mapped high-risk areas in the United States where sudden spikes could inundate hospitals as the surge in northern Italy did.

In their U.S. analysis, MIT researchers considered several risk factors, including elderly population, high blood pressure and obesity.

The takeaway, the researchers said, is that across the nation, “micro-geographies” of individual Zip codes or small towns have the potential to generate surges of covid-19 patients that could overwhelm even the most-prepared hospitals.

Levi said nursing home populations should be prioritized for virus testing across the country, because outbreaks in such close quarters can rapidly sicken dozens of people, who then flood into area hospitals.

By The Post’s analysis, the general Seattle region would need all of its available ICU beds — plus a 15 percent increase — to handle an outbreak in which 20 percent of the population is infected with the coronavirus and 20 percent of those people need hospitalization. But the demand for ICU beds could be lower because the curve of infections in Washington appears to be flattening, according to officials.

The Society of Critical Care Medicine estimates that there are nearly 29,000 critical-care specialized physicians like Johnson who are trained to work in ICUs in the United States. Yet about half of all acute-care hospitals have no specialists dedicated to their ICUs. Because of the demands of treating covid-19 patients, the lack of dedicated physicians “will be strongly felt” through a lack of high-quality care, the society said in a statement.

The society also projects that the nurses, respiratory therapists and physician assistants specially qualified to work with ICU patients may be in short supply as patient demand increases and the ranks of medical workers are thinned by illness and quarantine.

what has the hospital been doing as a prevention epicenter in the four years between the Ebola epidemic and the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic?

“Drilling and preparing for it,” said Jorge Salinas, an infectious-disease physician working on the effort. “You may be preparing and training for 10 years and nothing happens. But if you don’t do that, when these pandemics do occur, you will not be prepared.”

Salinas said the pandemic has exposed the long-standing flaws in the nation’s “individualistic” health-care system, where hospitals look out for themselves. Electronic health-monitoring systems vary hospital to hospital. Supply tallies are kept in-house and generally not shared. To counter this in Iowa, he said, all hospitals have begun sharing daily information with state officials.

“The name of the game is solidarity,” Salinas said. “If we try to be individualists, we will fail.”

The United States has tested about 4 million people over several months. A new Harvard report says we need to be testing more like 5 million every day. But because our federal government is failing so miserably in that effort, the rest of us are left to do what we can to at least try not to get this thing in the first place. That means staying away from other people. And it means hoping our states, cities and municipalities will step up and fill the leadership vacuum left by the White House. Because this is less a problem of people than leadership: Overwhelming majorities of Americans under lockdown orders are complying with them. Overwhelming majorities of Americans support the restrictions. But we know that many people will, understandably, trust what our leaders tell us -- and too many of our conservative leaders are not earning that trust.

Especially in times of crisis, civilians need intelligent, thoughtful leadership. We need leaders who understand they are not experts on everything under the sun, and that leading with a narrow and reactionary ideology is no way to govern. We need leaders who will take pains to understand the scientific consensus, make difficult choices when necessary and lead with the truth. Unfortunately, the US doesn't have that at a federal level -- and several red states don't have it at a state level, either. And we're all paying the price for this long-time GOP malfeasance.

America’s midlife crisis has been realized in the flesh in the decaying Woodland mall: these men and women have been overwhelmed by an inherently unsatisfiable longing for freedom. To them, paying taxes, to be compelled to pay taxes, is a form of enslavement. By this definition, who among us is free? Who among us could ever be free?

Is freedom just what you could have been, rather than what you turned out to be? Is freedom just a word for youth that has passed? At the Woodland mall they know that, whatever freedom is, they are losing it. “How far are you willing to be pushed?” Finicum Finch asks. “When is your faith going to be bigger than your fear?” No political programme could ever assuage the hunger for impossible freedom it has sprung from.

Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, came to the same conclusion: “the most potent and forcible cause” of the Roman empire’s collapse was “the domestic hostilities of the Romans themselves”

Cultures commit suicide. That’s how they end. Just like with men and women, it’s not the challenges of life that break you, it’s your own internal contradiction

America’s internal contradictions are beginning to overwhelm its politics. The preppers combine all the features that have defined American existence since its beginning: the apocalyptic visions, the maniacal over-reading of the constitution, the desire to live by self-reliance but in total conformity, self-righteous violence and the evasion of taxes.

How many great American tech companies boil down to tax-and-regulation-evasion schemes? Hollywood is the world’s number one gun fetishist. Donald Trump isn’t from north-west Ohio, he’s a New Yorker – more a Billy Joel New Yorker than a Lou Reed New Yorker, sure, but a New Yorker nonetheless. The traits on display at the Woodland mall are evident everywhere. They are present in every aspect of its history. Why do you think every major columnist at the New York Times thought bombing Baghdad to rubble would solve the crisis of the Middle East? They’re bred to it. In America, the answer is violence. What was the question again?

Middle age is when the bullshit you tell yourself begins to crumble of its own accord. Middle age is when the sum total of your decisions, rather than the dreams you began with, starts to become who you are. You were once the hero of your own story but the best you can manage now is to be the punchline to your own joke. The urge to have it all burn down and start over is ferocious.

Middle age, for people and for countries, is a reckoning much more uncomfortable than a collapse: you find out who you are.

In essence, Chait is saying that this change in the definition of ‘white supremacy’ makes having Donald Trump as President no different from having David Duke as President.

Serwer responds by pressing Chait on just what his definition of ‘white supremacy’ actually is and I think suggests that Chait’s is a largely meaningless distinction between people who support white supremacy and say so openly and people who support white supremacy while denying that they do.

The real definition has to be something like Serwer’s who suggests a “general definition of white supremacist is someone who believes white people are entitled to political and cultural hegemony.”

The changing demography post-1970 has brought the issue of white supremacy far more acutely and unavoidably to the fore than it was in the pas

By the definitions that Americans use to define race, the 1970 census found that 89.5% of Americans were white and 10% were black. Hispanics, which under the Census definition can be either white or black, made up 4.5% of the population. In other words, the country was overwhelmingly white and the only numerically significant racial minority was African-Americans. Asians and Hispanics made up a minuscule part of the population and were heavily concentrated in the Pacific West and Southwest.

Many people have not fully thought through how today’s dramatically different demography changes the very meaning of ‘white supremacy’. In 1970 a white person could fully support civil rights for African-Americans, oppose every sort of formal and informal bigotry and prejudice. But whites still made up almost 90% of the population. The political, social and cultural dominance of white people was a given regardless of whether you fully dismantled every aspect of white supremacy or not. The simple fact of overwhelming numerical superiority made that so

Accepting or even supporting equal political rights for a small minority of the population – which is frequently referred to precisely by their numerical minority status – is quite different from imagining a world where whites are not a majority at all.

at least as we define it today, whites will no longer be a majority at all in the relatively near future. Certainly, they won’t be the overwhelming majority able to define and dictate cultural, economic and political power more or less as they choose.

Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions are definitely different from David Duke. But – and I say this slightly jokingly but mainly in earnest – maybe we should call Sessions and Trump moderate white supremacists and Duke a white supremacist extremist.

If being white is a major part of your political and cultural identity, how you think about who you are, there really is a lot to worry about. That’s because being white isn’t really a biological reality, it’s a category in America that means being the dominant and powerful group.

So this is not just a rhetorical or taxonomic question, whether you say you’re a white supremacist or not while you’re supporting white supremacy. Trump exists and the question of white supremacy is right at the surface today because of the demographic tipping point that country stands at.

Whether Trump hates people of color or would take away their rights if he could is a mind-reading exercise we could talk about forever. But the fact that he believes in and wants to preserve a country where white people call the shots goes without saying. So maybe it’s not simply that we’re pulling David Duke and Donald Trump into the same definition. Maybe it is that the changes in the country have made the functional difference between the two much less relevant.

Many municipal and state health officials and lawmakers blame Bolsonaro's government for undermining their efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus. And the country's National Council of Health Secretaries (CONASS) has asked the federal government to adopt stricter measures to support hospitals and enforce social distancing.

"The health system in Brazil is on the verge of collapse," Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria told CNN's Becky Anderson during a recent interview. "There is no national coordination to combat the pandemic in Brazil. It would be important for the President and the governors to send the same message to the population, but this unfortunately, doesn't happen in Brazil.

He has made disobeying health guidance a point of pride, congratulating agricultural workers at an event last week for not staying home "like cowards."

"The emergence of new variants, which combine both the potential to be more transmissible and the absence of broad and articulated mitigation and suppression measures, are highly worrisome," the study's authors wrote, urging Brazil to encourage behaviors that limit the viral spread.

"The data showing the prevalence of this variant in several states and its ample spread throughout the country, as well as the challenges presented due to its high level of transmission, reinforce the immediate need to adopt non-pharmaceutical measures in order to reduce the speed or its spread and the increases in cases."

"This is what viruses do: They evolve, they get stronger. The only way to stop it is to contain its spread, which is why we need restrictive measures -- there is no other solution. Even if the Government decrees a national lockdown, we need the population to adhere. The action of each one of us will impact everyone as a whole," Naveca said.

Hope could be on its way, in the form of vaccines. But Brazil's vaccination rollout was slow in comparison to other countries, including others in the region, like Chile and Mexico.

Since then, roughly 4% of Brazil's 211 million citizens have received at least one vaccine dose, according to data from the Brazilian Health Ministry, and 2.3 million have had two doses.

"Pfizer says this very clearly on the contract, 'we are not responsible for any collateral side effects' - if you turn into an alligator it's your problem," Bolsonaro said in December. "If you become Superman, or grow a beard as a woman, or a man's voice becomes high pitched, they say they have nothing to do with that."

"I thank you for this meeting and we recognize Pfizer as a great world company," Bolsonaro said, during an excerpt of the meeting posted to his official Twitter account. "We would like to close these deals with you, even more given the aggressiveness of this virus in Brazil."

"The story in Brazil can be and will be repeated elsewhere if we stop implementing the measures as we need to implement them," he said. "Countries are going to lurch back into third and fourth surges if we're not careful."

"Unfortunately, I don't think we've learned our lesson," Molina said. "We [health workers] are tired, exhausted and are getting sick. We feel powerless. We need a more coordinated action if we're going to keep this from happening again.

In March of 2020, for example, he forwarded a correspondence about the possible Covid-19 immunity of indigenous people harvesting guano (bat excrement), as well as an idea from a psychiatry professor about using the antibiotic minocycline to slow viral replication. He commented on an email from a Swedish psychiatrist, "There may be nothing to this, but we should at least be aware." And in April of that year, he told a persistent doctor with multiple ideas for possible antiviral agents, "You are not being ignored."

I find the emails about the funding of Fauci's agency particularly fascinating. Over the course of the messages, budget discussions transition from small funding increases to tremendous week-on-week growths in expenditures -- particularly when the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was empowered by Congress to dream bigger thanks to $1.532 billion in supplemental appropriations. To put a finer point on this group of emails: it was these bigger dreams and bigger trials that provided us with important answers and, ultimately, with the vaccines.

At other times, it feels like looking at the celebrity photos on the front pages of People magazine: "He felt that way, too?!"

Finally, in between the lines, we watch him manage this pandemic as a human. There are emails where he is clearly overwhelmed, forwarding media request after speaking request to his assistants at the Office of the Chief of Staff. (One has to wonder: who wouldn't be overwhelmed by this number of requests?)

There are emails where he is tremendously kind, thanking people for their service, telling staff to "stay well and safe" or complimenting folks on well-written papers and columns.

Again and again, he responds to concerned citizens, scientists and journalists with: "Thank you for your note." He pays attention both to people he knows -- apologetically telling Ralph Nader at 7 p.m. on a Sunday, "I receive over 1000 e-mails per day and even with staff screening, I do not see them for days." -- and to those he probably doesn't. There are times when he's funny, times when he's frustrated and times when he's clearly exhausted, admitting that he's simply too tired to make sense of something.

He is just like us -- or, at least, he's how most of us like to imagine ourselves to be, on our best days.

dislikes the term breakthrough case, which evokes a barrier walling humans off from disease. “It’s very misleading,” she told me. “It’s like the virus ‘punches’ through our defenses.”

Immunity is not a monolith, and the degree of defense roused by an infection or a vaccine will differ from person to person, even between identical twins. Some people might have underlying conditions that hamstring their immune system’s response to vaccination; others might simply, by chance, churn out fewer or less potent antibodies and T cells that can nip a coronavirus infection in the bud.

An ideal response to vaccination might create an arsenal of immune molecules and cells that can instantaneously squelch the virus, leaving no time for symptoms to appear. But sometimes that front line of fighters is relatively sparse

Should the virus make it through, “it becomes a race [against] time,” Ellebedy told me. The pathogen rushes to copy itself, and the immune system recruits more defenders. The longer the tussle drags on, the more likely the disease is to manifest.

The range of vaccine responses “isn’t a variation of two- to threefold; it’s thousands,”

“Being vaccinated doesn’t mean you are immune. It means you have a better chance of protection.”

The number of post-vaccination infections is also contingent on “the ongoing transmission situation,” Omer told me. “It depends on how much people are mixing.”

he circumstances of exposure to any version of the coronavirus will also make a difference. If vaccinated people are spending time with groups of unvaccinated people in places where the virus is running rampant, that still raises their chance of getting sick. Large doses of the virus can overwhelm the sturdiest of immune defenses, if given the chance.

under many circumstances, vaccines are still best paired with safeguards such as masks and distancing—just as rain boots and jackets would help buffer someone in a storm.

Even excellent vaccines aren’t foolproof, and they shouldn’t be criticized when they’re not. “We can’t expect it’s going to be perfect, on day one, always,” Borio said.

The numbers for asymptomatic infections are still crystallizing, but they’re likely to be lower.

“Whenever someone tests positive, the real question is, are they sick, and how sick are they? That’s a big difference.”

Efficacy, a figure specific to clinical trials, also doesn’t always translate perfectly to the messiness of the real world, where there’s immense variability in how, when, where, by whom, and to whom shots are administered

The vaccine’s performance under these conditions is tracked by a separate measure, called effectiveness. Studies rigorously examining vaccine effectiveness are challenging, but early data suggest that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots are living up to their initial hype.

Vaccination is actually more like a single variable in a dynamic playing field—a layer of protection, like an umbrella, that might guard better in some situations than others. It could keep a lucky traveler relatively dry in a light drizzle, but in a windy maelstrom that’s whipping heavy droplets every which way, another person might be overwhelmed.

A vaccine with a recorded efficacy of 95 percent, for example, doesn’t give everyone who’s vaccinated a 5 percent chance of getting sick. Not all of those people will even encounter the virus

The key is how vaccination changes the outcome for those who are meaningfully exposed: Among 100 individuals who might have fallen ill without the vaccine, just five symptomatic cases might appear.

Businesses about 30 miles north, in the city of Fort Lauderdale, are monitoring the developments in Miami Beach. “We’ve been watching it very closely,” Dan Lindblade, president and chief executive of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce, said on Sunday evening. “We’ll do everything we have to do to make sure we don’t have the same situation happen up here.”

Seemingly undeterred by the police presence on Sunday night in South Beach, two maskless men in their 20s, who were wearing board shorts and clutching hard seltzers, took turns snorting white lines from a postcard. Around the corner, a group of police officers stood calmly, talking with one another and shouting for people to go home.

The Department of Homeland Security produces a threat assessment — but it is an overview, a DHS spokesperson told NPR, focusing on the "heightened threat environment during the 2020-2021 election season, including the extent to which the political transition and political polarization are contributing to the mobilization of individuals to commit violence."

This raw intelligence — bits and pieces of information scraped from various social media sites — indicates that there will likely be violence when lawmakers certify the presidential election results on Jan. 6.

But the DHS and the FBI do not create an intelligence report focused specifically on the upcoming pro-Trump rally.

These threat assessments or intelligence bulletins are typically written as a matter of course ahead of high-profile events. It's not clear why this didn't happen.

The Metropolitan Police Department arrests Enrique Tarrio, leader of the far-right Proud Boys group. He is charged with destruction of property and possession of high-capacity firearm magazines. He's released the next day and told to leave Washington.

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund asks permission from House and Senate security officials to request that the D.C. National Guard be placed on standby in case the protest gets out of control. The Washington Post reports: "House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving said he wasn't comfortable with the 'optics' of formally declaring an emergency ahead of the demonstration, Sund said. Meanwhile, Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger suggested that Sund should informally seek out his Guard contacts, asking them to 'lean forward' and be on alert in case Capitol Police needed their help."

The FBI Field Office in Norfolk, Va., issues an explicit warning that extremists have plans for violence the next day, as first reported by the Post. It releases its advisory report after FBI analysts find a roster of troubling information including specific threats against members of Congress, an exchange of maps of the tunnel system under the Capitol complex and organizational plans like setting up gathering places in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and South Carolina so extremists can meet to convoy to Washington.

The head of the FBI's Washington Field Office, Steven D'Antuono, later says that information is shared with the FBI's "law enforcement partners" through the bureau's Joint Terrorism Task Force. That includes the U.S. Capitol Police, U.S. Park Police, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and other agencies.

Officials convene a conference call with local law enforcement to discuss the Norfolk warning.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser announces that the MPD will be the lead law enforcement agency and will coordinate with the Capitol Police, Park Police and Secret Service.

The Metropolitan Police Department has jurisdiction on city streets; the U.S. Park Police on the Ellipse, where Trump's rally took place; the U.S. Secret Service in the vicinity of the White House; and the U.S. Capitol Police on the Capitol complex.

That day appears to have profoundly influenced the mayor's approach to the Jan. 6 events. In her letter, Bowser describes the difficulty and confusion of policing large crowds while working around other law enforcement personnel without proper coordination and identification.

Bowser requests, and receives, a limited force from the D.C. National Guard. The soldiers number 340, though they are unarmed and their job is to help with traffic flow — not law enforcement — which is to be handled by D.C. police.

Trump begins to address the crowd at the Ellipse, behind the White House. He falsely claims that "this election was stolen from you, from me, from the country." Trump calls on his supporters at the rally to march on the U.S. Capitol, saying he will walk with them. Instead, he returns to the White House.

"We see this huge crush of people coming down Pennsylvania Ave. toward the Capitol," reports NPR's Hannah Allam. "We follow the crowd as it goes up to the Hill, toward the Capitol. There's scaffolding set up for the inauguration already," she adds. "But as far as protection, all we really saw were some mesh barriers, some metal fencing and only a small contingent of Capitol Police. And we watched them being quickly overwhelmed." The FBI says multiple law enforcement agencies receive reports of a suspected pipe bomb at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. Fifteen minutes later, there are reports of a similar device at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

Mayor Bowser asks Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy for additional Guard forces

Capitol Police Chief Sund speaks with the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard Maj. Gen. William Walker by phone and requests immediate assistance.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany says on Twitter that the National Guard is on its way at Trump's direction.

Capitol Police send an alert that all buildings in the Capitol complex are on lockdown due to "an external security threat located on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building. ... [S]tay away from exterior windows and doors. If you are outside, seek cover."

The House and Senate abruptly go into recess.

On a conference call with Pentagon officials, D.C. Mayor Bowser requests National Guard support and Capitol Police Chief Sund pleads for backup.

Trump tweets criticism of Vice President Pence: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"

From inside the House chamber come reports of an armed standoff at the door to the chamber. Police officers have their guns drawn on someone trying to get in.

Acting Defense Secretary Miller determines that all available forces of the D.C. National Guard are required to reestablish security of the Capitol complex.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam tweets that his team is working closely with Mayor Bowser, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to respond to the situation.

Moving to the Senate terrace, they see protesters smashing the door of the Capitol to gain entry, as Capitol Police inside work to push them back.

rump tweets a video downplaying the events of the day, repeating false claims that the election was stolen and sympathizing with his followers, saying: "I know your pain, I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. ... You're very special. You've seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home, and go home in peace."

Acting Defense Secretary Miller authorizes the mobilization of up to 6,200 National Guard troops from Maryland, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, according to the Pentagon.

Trump tweets a message to his supporters. "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"

Capitol Police, MPD and the D.C. National Guard establish a perimeter on the west side of the Capitol.

The Capitol is declared secure. Members of Congress return to complete the opening and counting of the Electoral College votes.

Pence affirms that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have won the Electoral College: "Joseph R. Biden Jr. of the state of Delaware has received for president of the United States, 306 votes. Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 232 votes."

The FBI formally warns local law enforcement that armed protests are being planned for all 50 statehouses and the U.S. Capitol. The warning says an unidentified group is calling on others to help it "storm" state, local and federal courthouses, should Trump be removed as president before Inauguration Day.

Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, says two Capitol Police officers have been suspended. One of the suspended officers took a selfie with a rioter. The other put on a MAGA hat "and started directing people around," says Ryan.

The U.S. Justice Department says it has received more than 100,000 pieces of digital information in response to its call for tips about those responsible for the Capitol riot. The Justice Department says MPD acted on its intelligence to arrest the Proud Boys' Tarrio before the protest, and federal officials interrupted travel of others who planned to go to D.C.

The secretary of the Army announces that as many as 20,000 National Guard troops are expected to be deployed to D.C. for the inauguration. Some will be armed, while others will have access to their weapons but will not carry them.

FBI Director Christopher Wray says the bureau has identified more than 200 suspects from the Capitol riots and arrested more than 100 others in connection with the violence. "We know who you are if you're out there — and FBI agents are coming to find you," he warns.

U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz announces his office will begin "a review to examine the role and activity of DOJ and its components in preparing for and responding to the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021." Horowitz said his review will coordinate with IG reviews in the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Interior.

The new variant, called B 1.1.7 was first identified in Britain, where it rapidly became the primary source of infections, accounting for as many 60 percent of new cases diagnosed in London and surrounding areas.

Covid cases and deaths have broken record after record across the country, with a peak number of deaths, 4,400, announced on Tuesday. At least 3,973 new deaths and 238,390 new cases were reported on Thursday, and the nation is nearing a milestone of 400,000 deaths.

“I want to stress that we are deeply concerned that this strain is more transmissible and can accelerate outbreaks in the U.S.

In the new report, C.D.C. scientists modeled how quickly the variant might spread in the United States, assuming about 10 percent to 30 percent of people have pre-existing immunity to the virus, and another 1 million people will be vaccinated each week beginning this month.

It’s not yet clear what makes the new variants more contagious. They share at least one mutation, called N501Y, that is thought to be involved. One possibility, researchers said, is that the mutation may increase the amount of virus in the nose but not in the lungs — potentially explaining why it is more contagious, but not more deadly.A higher amount of virus in the nose means anyone infected would expel more virus while talking, singing, coughing or even breathing, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle

Federal health officials sounded the alarm Friday about a fast spreading, far more contagious variant of the coronavirus that is projected to become the dominant source of infection in the country by March, potentially fueling another wrenching surge of cases and deaths.

The variant is not known to be more deadly or to cause more severe disease. But the dire warning — hedged by limited data about just how prevalent the variant first identified in Britain has become — landed in a week where the nation’s nascent vaccination campaign was hampered by confusion and limited supplies as demand grew among growing numbers of eligible people

Only 76 cases of the variant have been identified so far in the U.S., but the actual number is believed to be higher and is expected to spiral upward in the next few weeks, officials said.

But spikes in cases threaten to cripple already overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes in many parts of the country. Some are at or near capacity. Others have faced troubling rates of infection among their staff, causing shortages and increasing patient loads.

One in 860 Americans have died of Covid-19 in the last year, according to new figures released by the C.D.C. But the burden of deaths has not fallen equally across racial, ethnic lines and geographic regions, and there is concern that vaccines will not reach the hardest hit communities, where access to health services is limited and distrust is rampant. Editors’ PicksFor Pro Athlete Leading Social Justice Push, a Victory and UncertaintyJames Comey’s View of Justice — and How It Differs From Donald Trump’sHow ‘Orwellian’ Became an All-Purpose InsultAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyImage

If the variant is about 50 percent more contagious, as suggested by data from Britain, it will become the predominant source of all infections in the United States by March, the model showed. A slow rollout of vaccinations will hasten that fate.

The legislation approved by Congress this week would impose sanctions on Chinese officials who commit human rights abuses in the semiautonomous island territory and place Hong Kong’s special economic status under greater scrutiny.

Security forces in Hong Kong have escalated their crackdown on pro-democracy protesters this month, prompting Congress to approve a Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act it had been considering for months.

Mr. Trump said that the protests were a complicating factor in his trade negotiations with Beijing, which have stalled ahead of an important Dec. 15 deadline, when Mr. Trump must decide whether to issue yet more tariffs on Chinese goods.

he also took credit for the fact that China had not extinguished the protests with a sweeping and violent crackdown.

Mr. Trump and other administration officials have warned that an overwhelming Chinese response would have wider repercussions in the relationship between China and Beijing, including in the trade talks.But analysts say there are many reasons China’s government has refrained from an all-out violent crackdown like the one that snuffed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. They include the risk of an enormous international backlash and lasting damage to Hong Kong’s powerhouse economy.

Congress passed its Hong Kong bill with an overwhelming majority, meaning that it could probably override a presidential veto easily, the first override of his presidency. Mr. Trump could also choose not to sign the bill without vetoing it, in which case it would also become law.

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all.

I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy

What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.

For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.

Yet CNN and MSNBC have shown zero hesitation in giving her a platform to lie because they see their job as giving government officials — even ones who lie — a platform.

And we know that false claims, if they’re repeated enough, become more plausible the more often they’re shared, something psychologists have called the “illusory truth” effect. Our brains, it turns out, tend to associate repetition with truthfulness. Some interesting new research, moreover, found that the more people encounter information the more likely they are to feel justified in spreading it, whether it’s true or not.

It’s worth noting that this polarization is asymmetric. The left overwhelmingly receives its news from organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or cable news networks like MSNBC or CNN. Some of the reporting is surely biased, and probably biased in favor of liberals, but it’s still (mostly) anchored to basic journalistic ethics.

The fact is, Trump did what Democrats have accused him of doing. We know, with absolute certainty, that the president tried to get a foreign government to investigate a family member of one of his political rivals

The way impeachment has played out underscores just how the new media ecosystem is a problem for our democracy.

Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.

As is often the case, the diagnosis is much easier than the cure. But liberal democracy cannot function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, that shared understanding is impossible.

The first big lie is the claim that America is being menaced by hordes of “rioters, looters, arsonists, gun-grabbers, flag-burners, Marxists.”

Anyone who walks around the “anarchist jurisdictions” of New York or Seattle can see with their own eyes that nothing like this is happening. And the data bear out the obvious.

One systematic study found that the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, and that “most of the violence that did take place was, in fact, directed against the B.L.M. protesters.”

he wants us to ignore the very real menace of Covid-19.

But Trump wants Americans to believe that the pandemic — which killed more Americans last month than are murdered in a typical year — is fake news

These big lies are immensely destructive, and not just because they lead to bad policies. Like it or not, presidential rhetoric affects how millions of Americans behave.

Trump’s lies about an anarchist threat have given encouragement to white supremacists, including domestic terrorists.

His dismissal of the pandemic threat, his mocking of precautionary measures like mask-wearing, have done a lot to help the coronavirus spread.

Unless he loses in an overwhelming landslide, he has indicated he will try to steal the election by blocking the counting of Biden votes, with the aid of partisan judges.

The immediate result may very well be a wave of violence and property destruction — Trump supporters engaging in the behavior they falsely attribute to Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

No, the really big danger is that millions of our citizens will probably buy into an American version of the “stab in the back” myth that loomed large after Germany’s defeat in World War I, claiming the military was betrayed by the civilian government. And those voters may well end up choosing the G.O.P.’s next presidential candidate.

States are already on alert for violence. On Monday, Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard to be on standby in case of turmoil following Tuesday’s election.

Hundreds of National Guard troops already have been called up in non-law-enforcement roles, to assist states where the ranks of poll workers have been depleted by the coronavirus pandemic.

But in a year that is anything but normal, with the electorate sharply polarized, the president warning supporters of a stolen election, and gun sales through the roof, states are bracing for violence that may overwhelm local law enforcement and bring uniformed military troops into the streets.

Legal experts say the election may complicate the response because the president has broad discretion to sidestep legal restrictions by declaring an insurrection, which would allow him not only to take control of state National Guard troops, but also to deploy the Army or Marines.

But at the same time Mr. Trump threatened to deploy active-duty troops, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued against such a move to control the wave of protests in American cities, including Washington, at least at that time

Mr. Esper said at a Pentagon news conference that deploying active-duty forces in a domestic law enforcement role “should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”

Governors have mobilized Guard forces frequently in recent months to respond to protests over violent policing, as well as hurricanes and wildfires. In June, during the height of the protests, about 86,000 Guard troops were deployed in domestic missions.

While federal law bars using federal troops, that restriction can be lifted by the president under the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to send in armed forces if he decides local authorities are not enforcing the laws of the United States.

The Insurrection Act could complicate the response to civil unrest, Ms. VanLandingham said, because mayors and governors have no say in what is classified as insurrection, so troops could be sent in even if local authorities do not think they are needed.

he and other researchers estimated that population heterogeneity shaves the coronavirus herd immunity rate to 43 percent. Others say it might be lower.

Gabriela Gomes, a mathematician at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, has scrutinized European cities overwhelmed by the disease. In a paper she wrote with nine other researchers, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, she arrived at a striking conclusion: Herd immunity could be lower than 20 percent.

many researchers have been reluctant to say whether they believe the worst in some of the hardest-hit cities has already passed. No one knows how long immunity lasts. The virus could mutate.

“I would love that as well. But the reality is that it’s wishful thinking. It’s confirmation bias. We can’t pick evidence we hope is true. We have to be very careful about this because it could blow up in your face very quickly.”

Officials weren’t willing to impose a lockdown. In impoverished Manaus, where many already live on the brink, the mayor said it would lead to social chaos and violence. So Pinheiro Alves spent his off hours trying to jury-rig ventilators.

“There isn’t a concrete explanation,” said Henrique dos Santos Pereira, a scientist at the Federal University of Amazonas. Maybe there’s an unseen biological immunity in the population. Or the city’s relative youth staved off the worst.

“The problem is that we don’t know how many people are susceptible,” dos Santos Pereira said. “In the beginning, we were thinking it was everywhere, but it doesn’t seem like the whole world is susceptible … It is causing us to reconsider the theory of herd immunity.”

Virgílio, the mayor, hopes the scientists are right. The medical system in Manaus has failed once. If a second wave does come, he has little doubt what would happen.“Our capacities would be overwhelmed.”

But the policy has also, increasingly, made China an outlier. The rest of the world is reopening, including New Zealand and Australia, which also once embraced zero tolerance. China is now the only country still chasing full eradication of the virus.

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has repeatedly pointed to the country’s success in containment as proof of the superiority of its governance model

China may find itself increasingly isolated, diplomatically and economically, at a time when global public opinion is hardening against it.

the Chinese Communist Party’s very hold on power seemed to hinge on its ability to control the virus. Its initial attempts to cover up the outbreak in Wuhan gave rise to a stunning outpouring of public anger. Images of overwhelmed hospitals and patients begging for help flooded the Chinese internet.

China’s strict lockdowns and mass testing campaigns, once criticized as heavy handed, became models for other countries.

When Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert from Shanghai, suggested this summer that China learn to live with the virus, he was attacked viciously online as a lackey of foreigners. A former Chinese health minister called such a mindset reckless.

Australia, which was home to the world’s longest lockdown, is scrapping quarantine requirements for vaccinated residents returning from overseas. New Zealand formally abandoned its quest for zero this month. Singapore is offering quarantine-free travel to vaccinated tourists from Germany, the United States, France and several other countries

There are also more practical reasons for China’s hesitation. Medical resources are highly concentrated in big cities, and more remote areas could quickly be overwhelmed by an uptick in cases, said Zhang Jun, an urban studies scholar at the City University of Hong Kong.

In addition, though China has achieved a relatively high full inoculation rate, at 75 percent of its population, questions have emerged about the efficacy of its homegrown vaccines.

And, at least for now, the elimination strategy appears to enjoy public support. While residents in locked-down areas have complained about seemingly arbitrary or overly harsh restrictions on social media, travel is relatively unconstrained in areas without cases. Wealthy consumers have poured money into luxury goods and fancy cars since they’re not spending on trips abroad.

Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.

This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades

Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand.

In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.

that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism.

The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.

It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority.

“It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized about remaking the world in its image, only to reveal an ugly image of itself to the world.

“We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity.

To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end.

“The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network among U.S. officials

The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, almost suffocating feel to them, as though every turn invariably leads to the first crush of steel and glass.

With the system “blinking red,” as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not enough? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

A last-minute flight change. A new job at the Pentagon. A retirement from the fire station. The final tilt of a plane’s wings before impact. If the books about the lead-up to 9/11 are packed with unbearable inevitability, the volumes on the day itself highlight how randomness separated survival from death.

Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.

Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. “It increased the floor space available for rent . . . by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit,” the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.

The towers embodied the power of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that day, both conditions proved fatal.

Garrett Graff quotes Defense Department officials marveling at how American Airlines Flight 77 struck a part of the Pentagon that, because of new anti-terrorism standards, had recently been reinforced and renovated

“In any other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would have flown right through the middle of the building.” Instead, fewer than 200 people were killed in the attack on the Pentagon, including the passengers on the hijacked jet. Chance and preparedness came together.

The bravery of police and firefighters is the subject of countless 9/11 retrospectives, but these books also emphasize the selflessness of civilians who morphed into first responders

The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”

The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana

Such episodes, led by ordinary civilians, embodied values that the 9/11 Commission called on the nation to display. Except those values would soon be dismantled, in the name of security, by those entrusted to uphold them.

Lawyering to death.The phrase appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, usually uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to get things done, laws and rules be damned

“I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win,” Bush explains. “No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death.” In “Against All Enemies,” Clarke recalls the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush snapped at an official who suggested that international law looked askance at military force as a tool of revenge. “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass,” the president retorted.

The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism

Except, they did lawyer this thing to death. Instead of disregarding the law, the Bush administration enlisted it. “Beginning almost immediately after September 11, 2001, [Vice President Dick] Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror,

Through public declarations and secret memos, the administration sought to remove limits on the president’s conduct of warfare and to deny terrorism suspects the protections of the Geneva Conventions by redefining them as unlawful enemy combatants. Nothing, Mayer argues of the latter effort, “more directly cleared the way for torture than this.”

Tactics such as cramped confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding were rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” legally and linguistically contorted to avoid the label of torture. Though the techniques could be cruel and inhuman, the OLC acknowledged in an August 2002 memo, they would constitute torture only if they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or death, and if the individual inflicting such pain really really meant to do so: “Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent.” It’s quite the sleight of hand, with torture moving from the body of the interrogated to the mind of the interrogator.

the memo concludes that none of it actually matters. Even if a particular interrogation method would cross some legal line, the relevant statute would be considered unconstitutional because it “impermissibly encroached” on the commander in chief’s authority to conduct warfare

You have informed us. Experts you have consulted. Based on your research. You do not anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Department relies on information provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to proceed with its interrogations. It’s a perfect circle of trust.

In these documents, lawyers enable lawlessness. Another May 2005 memo concludes that, because the Convention Against Torture applies only to actions occurring under U.S. jurisdiction, the CIA’s creation of detention sites in other countries renders the convention “inapplicable.”

avid Cole describes the documents as “bad-faith lawyering,” which might be generous. It is another kind of lawyering to death, one in which the rule of law that the 9/11 Commission urged us to abide by becomes the victim.

Similarly, because the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is meant to protect people convicted of crimes, it should not apply to terrorism detainees — because they have not been officially convicted of anything. The lack of due process conveniently eliminates constitutional protections

Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. Its massive report — the executive summary of which appeared as a 549-page book in 2014 — found that torture did not produce useful intelligence, that the interrogations were more brutal than the CIA let on, that the Justice Department did not independently verify the CIA’s information, and that the spy agency impeded oversight by Congress and the CIA inspector general.

“The CIA’s effectiveness representations were almost entirely inaccurate,” the Senate report concluded. It is one of the few lies of the war on terror unmasked by an official government investigation and public report, but just one of the many documented in the 9/11 literature.

Officials in the war on terror didn’t deceive or dissemble just with lawmakers or the public. In the recurring tragedy of war, they lied just as often to themselves.

“The decision to invade Iraq was one made, finally and exclusively, by the president of the United States, George W. Bush,” he writes.

n Woodward’s “Bush at War,” the president admitted that before 9/11, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency [about al-Qaeda], and my blood was not nearly as boiling.”

A president initially concerned about defending and preserving the nation’s moral goodness against terrorism found himself driven by darker impulses. “I’m having difficulty controlling my bloodlust,” Bush confessed to religious leaders in the Oval Office on Sept. 20, 2001,

Bloodlust, moral certainty and sudden vulnerability make a dangerous combination. The belief that you are defending good against evil can lead to the belief that whatever you do to that end is good, too.

Draper distills Bush’s worldview: “The terrorists’ primary objective was to destroy America’s freedom. Saddam hated America. Therefore, he hated freedom. Therefore, Saddam was himself a terrorist, bent on destroying America and its freedom.”

The president assumed the worst about what Hussein had done or might do, yet embraced best-case scenarios of how an American invasion would proceed.

“Iraqis would rejoice at the sight of their Western liberators,” Draper recaps. “Their newly shared sense of national purpose would overcome any sectarian allegiances. Their native cleverness would make up for their inexperience with self-government. They would welcome the stewardship of Iraqi expatriates who had not set foot in Baghdad in decades. And their oil would pay for everything.”

It did not seem to occur to Bush and his advisers that Iraqis could simultaneously hate Hussein and resent the Americans — feelings that could have been discovered by speaking to Iraqis and hearing their concerns.

few books on the war that gets deep inside Iraqis’ aversion to the Americans in their midst. “What gives them the right to change something that’s not theirs in the first place?” a woman in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood asks him. “I don’t like your house, so I’m going to bomb it and you can rebuild it again the way I want it, with your money?

The occupation did not dissuade such impressions when it turned the former dictator’s seat of government into its own luxurious Green Zone, or when it retrofitted the Abu Ghraib prison (“the worst of Saddam’s hellholes,” Shadid calls it) into its own chamber of horrors.

Shadid hears early talk of the Americans as “kuffar” (heathens), a 51-year-old former teacher complains that “we’ve exchanged a tyrant for an occupier.”

Shadid understood that governmental legitimacy — who gets to rule, and by what right — was a matter of overriding importance for Iraqis. “The Americans never understood the question,” he writes; “Iraqis never agreed on the answer.

When the United States so quickly shifted from liberation to occupation, it lost whatever legitimacy it enjoyed. “Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land,” Clarke writes. “It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting ‘invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.’ ”

The foolishness and arrogance of the American occupation didn’t help. In “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains how, even as daily security was Iraqis’ overwhelming concern, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Bush’s man in Baghdad, was determined to turn the country into a model free-market economy, complete with new investment laws, bankruptcy courts and a state-of-the-art stock exchange.

a U.S. Army general, when asked by local journalists why American helicopters must fly so low at night, thus scaring Iraqi children, replied that the kids were simply hearing “the sound of freedom.”Message: Freedom sounds terrifying.

For some Americans, inflicting that terror became part of the job, one more tool in the arsenal. In “The Forever War” by Dexter Filkins, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel in Iraq assures the author that “with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”

Chandrasekaran recalls the response of a top communications official under Bremer, when reporters asked about waves of violence hitting Baghdad in the spring of 2004. “Off the record: Paris is burning,” the official told the journalists. “On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

the Iraq War, conjured in part on the false connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, ended up helping the terrorist network: It pulled resources from the war in Afghanistan, gave space for bin Laden’s men to regroup and spurred a new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. “A bigger gift to bin Laden was hard to imagine,” Bergen writes.

“U.S. officials had no need to lie or spin to justify the war,” Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes in “The Afghanistan Papers,” a damning contrast of the war’s reality vs. its rhetoric. “Yet leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department soon began to make false assurances and to paper over setbacks on the battlefield.” As the years passed, the deceit became entrenched, what Whitlock calls “an unspoken conspiracy” to hide the truth.

Afghanistan was where al-Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, had made its base — it was supposed to be the good war, the right war, the war of necessity and not choice, the war endorsed at home and abroad.

If Iraq was the war born of lies, Afghanistan was the one nurtured by them

Whitlock finds commanding generals privately admitting that they long fought the war “without a functional strategy.” That, two years into the conflict, Rumsfeld complained that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

That Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former coordinator of Iraq and Afghanistan policy, acknowledged that “we didn’t have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking.”

That U.S. officials long wanted to withdraw American forces but feared — correctly so, it turns out — that the Afghan government might collapse. “Bin Laden had hoped for this exact scenario,” Whitlock observes. “To lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.”

All along, top officials publicly contradicted these internal views, issuing favorable accounts of steady progress

Bad news was twisted into good: Rising suicide attacks in Kabul meant the Taliban was too weak for direct combat, for instance, while increased U.S. casualties meant America was taking the fight to the enemy.

deceptions transpired across U.S. presidents, but the Obama administration, eager to show that its first-term troop surge was working, “took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false,” Whitlock writes. And then under President Donald Trump, he adds, the generals felt pressure to “speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed.”

in public, almost no senior government officials had the courage to admit that the United States was slowly losing,” Whitlock writes. “With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict.”

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Moscow shortly after 9/11 to give officials a heads up about the coming hostilities in Afghanistan. The Russians, recent visitors to the graveyard of empires, cautioned that Afghanistan was an “ambush heaven” and that, in the words of one of them, “you’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you.”

a war should not be measured only by the timing and the competence of its end. We still face an equally consequential appraisal: How good was this good war if it could be sustained only by lies?

In the two decades since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has often attempted to reconsider its response

They are written as though intending to solve problems. But they can be read as proof that the problems have no realistic solution, or that the only solution is to never have created them.

the report sets the bar for staying so high that an exit strategy appears to be its primary purpose.

he counterinsurgency manual is an extraordinary document. Implicitly repudiating notions such as “shock and awe” and “overwhelming force,” it argues that the key to battling an insurgency in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is to provide security for the local population and to win its support through effective governance

It also attempts to grasp the nature of America’s foes. “Most enemies either do not try to defeat the United States with conventional operations or do not limit themselves to purely military means,” the manual states. “They know that they cannot compete with U.S. forces on those terms. Instead, they try to exhaust U.S. national will.” Exhausting America’s will is an objective that al-Qaeda understood well.

“Counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term commitment,” the manual states. Yet, just a few pages later, it admits that “eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers or occupiers.” How to accomplish the former without descending into the latter? No wonder so many of the historical examples of counterinsurgency that the manual highlights, including accounts from the Vietnam War, are stories of failure.

“Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the manual proclaims, but the arduous tasks involved — reestablishing government institutions, rebuilding infrastructure, strengthening local security forces, enforcing the rule of law — reveal the tension at the heart of the new doctrine

In his foreword, Army Lt. Col. John Nagl writes that the document’s most lasting impact may be as a catalyst not for remaking Iraq or Afghanistan, but for transforming the Army and Marine Corps into “more effective learning organizations,” better able to adapt to changing warfare. And in her introduction, Sarah Sewall, then director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, concludes that its “ultimate value” may be in warning civilian officials to think hard before engaging in a counterinsurgency campaign.

“The thing that got to everyone,” Finkel explains in the latter book, “was not having a defined front line. It was a war in 360 degrees, no front to advance toward, no enemy in uniform, no predictable patterns, no relief.” It’s a powerful summation of battling an insurgency.

Hitting the wrong house is what counterinsurgency doctrine is supposed to avoid. Even successfully capturing or killing a high-value target can be counterproductive if in the process you terrorize a community and create more enemies. In Iraq, the whole country was the wrong house. America’s leaders knew it was the wrong house. They hit it anyway.

Another returning soldier, Nic DeNinno, struggles to tell his wife about the time he and his fellow soldiers burst into an Iraqi home in search of a high-value target. He threw a man down the stairs and held another by the throat. After they left, the lieutenant told him it was the wrong house. “The wrong f---ing house,” Nic says to his wife. “One of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house.”

“As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer,” the report states. “Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes.” Before making definitive judgments, then, they ask themselves “whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time.”

Two of the latest additions to the canon, “Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman and “Subtle Tools” by Karen Greenberg, draw straight, stark lines between the earliest days of the war on terror and its mutations in our current time, between conflicts abroad and divisions at home. These works show how 9/11 remains with us, and how we are still living in the ruins.

When Trump declared that “we don’t have victories anymore” in his 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy, he was both belittling the legacy of 9/11 and harnessing it to his ends. “His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself,” Ackerman writes. “That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness.” And if greatness is lost, someone must have taken it.

“Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11,” Ackerman writes, “that the terrorists were whomever you said they were.”

The backlash against Muslims, against immigrants crossing the southern border and against protesters rallying for racial justice was strengthened by the open-ended nature of the global war on terror.

the war is not just far away in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Yemen or Syria, but it’s happening here, with mass surveillance, militarized law enforcement and the rebranding of immigration as a threat to the nation’s security rather than a cornerstone of its identity

the Authorization for Use of Military Force, drafted by administration lawyers and approved by Congress just days after the attacks, as the moment when America’s response began to go awry. The brief joint resolution allowed the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against any nation, organization or person who committed the attacks, and to prevent any future ones.

It was the “Ur document in the war on terror and its legacy,” Greenberg writes. “Riddled with imprecision, its terminology was geared to codify expansive powers.” Where the battlefield, the enemy and the definition of victory all remain vague, war becomes endlessly expansive, “with neither temporal nor geographical boundaries.”

This was the moment the war on terror was “conceptually doomed,” Ackerman concludes. This is how you get a forever war.

There were moments when an off-ramp was visible. The killing of bin Laden in 2011 was one such instance, Ackerman argues, but “Obama squandered the best chance anyone could ever have to end the 9/11 era.”

The author assails Obama for making the war on terror more “sustainable” through a veneer of legality — banning torture yet failing to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and relying on drone strikes that “perversely incentivized the military and the CIA to kill instead of capture.”

There would always be more targets, more battlefields, regardless of president or party. Failures became the reason to double down, never wind down.

The longer the war went on, the more that what Ackerman calls its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism would move to the foreground of American politics

Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate — and using that lie as a successful political platform.

Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation’s urban streets as a “battle space” to be dominated

In his latest book on bin Laden, Bergen argues that 9/11 was a major tactical success but a long-term strategic failure for the terrorist leader. Yes, he struck a vicious blow against “the head of the snake,” as he called the United States, but “rather than ending American influence in the Muslim world, the 9/11 attacks greatly amplified it,” with two lengthy, large-scale invasions and new bases established throughout the region.

“A vastly different America has taken root” in the two decades since 9/11, Greenberg writes. “In the name of retaliation, ‘justice,’ and prevention, fundamental values have been cast aside.”

the legacy of the 9/11 era is found not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but also in an America that drew out and heightened some of its ugliest impulses — a nation that is deeply divided (like those “separated states” bin Laden imagined); that bypasses inconvenient facts and embraces conspiracy theories; that demonizes outsiders; and that, after failing to spread freedom and democracy around the world, seems less inclined to uphold them here

Seventeen years after the 9/11 Commission called on the United States to offer moral leadership to the world and to be generous and caring to our neighbors, our moral leadership is in question, and we can barely be generous and caring to ourselves.

Still reeling from an attack that dropped out of a blue sky, America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a broken good country.

9/11 was a test. Thebooks of the lasttwo decades showhow America failed.

Deep within the catalogue of regrets that is the 9/11 Commission report

And among Democratic voters, there is little confidence in him as the standard-bearer once again in 2024.

Forty-four percent said someone else would be better,

Overall, 58% said they trust elections in the country either a great deal or a good amount.

But while almost 9 in 10 Democrats and 60% of independents said so, just a third of Republicans agreed.

There was more trust in state and local governments than the electoral process overall — even though all elections in this country are conducted at the local level.

Republicans, though, did seem affected by Trump's messaging, because 60% said they have less confidence that their state and local governments will conduct the elections fairly and accurately since the 2020 presidential election.

three-quarters of Republicans said those extra counts happened mostly because there are real cases of fraud in these states.

making false claims about the election being rigged mostly because he didn't like his loss.

he overwhelming majority of Republicans say they simply don't believe it. It's a lie that Trump continues to push and is amplified by the conservative media echo chamber.

About half of those with them say they trust elections, while less than 3 in 10 without degrees said so.

But when it came to Trump's claims, those without degrees were 10 points more likely to believe him.

Nonwhites were 10 points more likely to say Democrats have a better chance of winning with Biden than without him — but even they were split with 43% saying so and 43% saying someone else would be better.

Trump starts in a better position than Biden with his base, but it's still not an overwhelming vote of confidence for a former president with as much sway as he appears to have with GOP elected officials.

I had other doubts, too. It seemed hubristic, or worse, to make multitrillion-dollar policy bets based on computer models trying to forecast climate patterns decades into the future. Climate activists kept promoting policies based on technologies that were either far from mature (solar energy) or sometimes actively harmful (biofuels).

Expensive efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and North America seemed particularly fruitless when China, India and other developing countries weren’t about to curb their own appetite for fossil fuels

just how fast is Greenland’s ice melting right now? Is this an emergency for our time, or is it a problem for the future?

His pitch was simple: The coastline we have taken for granted for thousands of years of human history changed rapidly in the past on account of natural forces — and would soon be changing rapidly and disastrously by man-made ones. A trip to Greenland, which holds one-eighth of the world’s ice on land (most of the rest is in Antarctica) would show me just how drastic those changes have been. Would I join him?

Greenland is about the size of Alaska and California combined and, except at its coasts, is covered by ice that in places is nearly two miles thick. Even that’s only a fraction of the ice in Antarctica, which is more than six times as large

Greenland’s ice also poses a nearer-term risk because it is melting faster. If all its ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise by some 24 feet. That would be more than enough to inundate hundreds of coastal cities in scores of nations, from Jakarta and Bangkok to Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Miami and New Orleans.

There was also a millenarian fervor that bothered me about climate activism, with its apocalyptic imagery (the Statue of Liberty underwater) and threats of doom unless we were willing to live far more frugally.

“We haven’t had a good positive mass balance year since the late 1990s,” he told me in a follow-on email when I asked him to explain the data for me. The losses can vary sharply by year. The annualized average over the past 30 years, he added, is 170 gigatons per year. That’s the equivalent of about 5,400 tons of ice loss per second. That “suggests that Greenland ice loss has been tracking the I.P.P.C. worse-case, highest-carbon-emission scenario.

The data shows unmistakably that Greenland’s ice is not in balance. It is losing far more than it is gaining.

scientists have been drilling ice-core samples from Greenland for decades, giving them a very good idea of climatic changes stretching back thousands of years. Better yet, a pair of satellites that detect anomalies in Earth’s gravity fields have been taking measurements of the sheet regularly for nearly 20 years, giving scientists a much more precise idea of what is happening.

it’s hard to forecast with any precision what that means. “Anyone who says they know what the sea level is going to be in 2100 is giving you an educated guess,” said NASA’s Willis. “The fact is, we’re seeing these big ice sheets melt for the first time in history, and we don’t really know how fast they can go.”

His own educated guess: “By 2100, we are probably looking at more than a foot or two and hopefully less than seven or eight feet. But we are struggling to figure out just how fast the ice sheets can melt. So the upper end of range is still not well known.”

On the face of it, that sounds manageable. Even if sea levels rise by eight feet, won’t the world have nearly 80 years to come to grips with the problem, during which technologies that help us mitigate the effects of climate change while adapting to its consequences are likely to make dramatic advances?

Won’t the world — including countries that today are poor — become far richer and thus more capable of weathering the floods, surges and superstorms?

The average rate at which sea level is rising around the world, he estimates, has more than tripled over the past three decades, to five millimeters a year from 1.5 millimeters. That may still seem minute, yet as the world learned during the pandemic, exponential increases have a way of hitting hard.

“When something is on a straight line or a smooth curve, you can plot its trajectory,” Englander said. “But sea level, like earthquakes and mudslides, is something that happens irregularly and can change rather quickly and surprise us. The point is, you can no longer predict the future by the recent past.”

In The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, where I used to work, the theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, a former under secretary for science in the Obama administration’s Energy Department, cast doubt on the threat from Thwaites in a voice that could have once been mine. He also thinks the risks associated with Greenland’s melting are less a product of human-induced global warming than of natural cycles in North Atlantic currents and temperatures, which over time have a way of regressing to the mean.

Even the poorest countries, while still unacceptably vulnerable, are suffering far fewer human and economic losses to climate-related disasters.

Another climate nonalarmist is Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I call Pielke a nonalarmist rather than a skeptic because he readily acknowledges that the challenges associated with climate change, including sea-level rise, are real, serious and probably unstoppable, at least for many decades.

“If we have to have a problem,” he told me when I reached him by phone, “we probably want one with a slow onset that we can see coming. It’s not like an asteroid coming from space.”

“Since the 1940s, the impact of floods as a proportion of U.S. gross domestic product has dropped by 70 percent-plus,” Pielke said. “We see this around the world, across phenomena. The story is that fewer people are dying and we are having less damage proportional to G.D.P.”

“Much climate reporting today highlights short-term changes when they fit the narrative of a broken climate but then ignores or plays down changes when they don’t, often dismissing them as ‘just weather,’” he wrote in February.

Global warming is real and getting worse, Pielke said, yet still it’s possible that humanity will be able to adapt to, and compensate for, its effects.

A few years ago, I would have found voices like Koonin’s and Pielke’s persuasive. Now I’m less sure. What intervened was a pandemic.